[nigeljedi]

Ok. An informal poll here. I'm trying to see what (at least around here) PDA everyone uses and why they like it. Has anyone switched from one to another for a particular reason?
I have a Visor basic, with an 8MB expansion module. I really like it, but desire the color capability of the Prism. How about everyone else?

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Enjoy Sunny Graphics/Illustration

[WL2100]

informally I use...

A Ex-Apple Newton Messagepad 2000 upgraded and overclocked to 215-Mhz. 4 megs. of DRAM, 4 megs. of Flash RAM. #1 PC card slot has a 32 meg. Linear Flash RAM memory card. #2 PC card slot has a 56K PC card modem. It has a IrDA that can beam to HP IrDA printers and Palms/Handsprings and transfer software to IrDA-iMacs. It has a screen a little bit larger than a 3x5 card. It has 'TRUE' HWR. I download web pages like a full-featured computer, including Frames, Tables, cookie-enabled pages(Yahoo mail), and a little JAVA. I download email(POP3) with .wav files, jpegs, .gifs, .ani.gifs, and of course text-email. I use speadsheets that are 1-to-10 columns across, 10-30 rows down, and have import/export to Excel(Mac and Win.), that's ON-THE-SCREEN, there's up to GQ-across, over 1000-rows down off screen. I keep over 500 people/business contacts and their info. in my Newt. I keep most of my date-info. with LOUD alarms in my Newt. I have databases that take up over 5 megs. of info., quickly searchable. I have Pocket Quicken to maintain my expenses, if I need to I can exchange with Quicken on desktop/laptop. I have a flat database that maintains LOTS of info. that I can also customize on the go. I have over twenty games that include a 'Mortal Combat' copycat with cool sounds and fast graphics. I have over 500 sounds! I fax to/from my Newt. Last but not least, ALL this can be done with four AA batts. that last one-to-thirty days. OH YEAH!!!...if the batts. run out and it takes me over ten seconds to replace/plug-in my Newt. THE INFO. STAYS INTACT!!!(try that with a Palm/Handspring). Any questions?

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!ooW ÷)

[scaught]

i use a palm iii that i purchased sometime in 98 i think. only 2 megs of RAM, but ive never had reason to need more. i looked into purchasing some type of expansion thing that would make it a 8 meg machine, but that was when i was playing alot of palm games and i havent been doing too much of that lately.

as for making a switch from this machine to another:
1. color doesnt do anything for me on a palm device at the resolutions these things are currently at (160x160), although a couple devices like the new handera and the new sony color device are breaking that barrier.
2. theres nothing that the new palm OS handhelds can do that mine cant. (SD/compact flash/handspring modules type stuff aside).

if i did decide to go with some other machine, i would wanna try out an ipaq or something just because i could use it as an mp3 player.

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you're going to have my foot at your lip in a minute, young man.

scott

Originally posted by nigeljedi:
Ok. An informal poll here. I'm trying to see what (at least around here) PDA everyone uses and why they like it. Has anyone switched from one to another for a particular reason?
I have a Visor basic, with an 8MB expansion module. I really like it, but desire the color capability of the Prism. How about everyone else?

Have got a TRGpro.
CF is absolutely cool. It´s cheaper than SpringBoart and makes an easy BackupSolution.
although i wish i had waited for the Handera 330.
It als accepts Palm III peripherals. You can have lots of Data on the CF-Card and even access them as if in RAM. Great Palm! Also accepts NiMH Batterys. No hassle with built-in Batteries.
Color would be nice, but the Features the TRG/Handera offer are far better than Color.

Also Syncs to iMac and Pismo via IrDA.

Great!

Greetings,
Morgoth

[Paul Guyot]

I'm trying to see what (at least around here) PDA everyone uses and why they like it.

I use an MP2100. I like it because it's the first (and only?) attempt to design a next generation of operating systems. NewtonOS isn't perfect yet, but it reached a maturity with NOS 2.1. You might say, who minds? Well, it implies the magic of NewtonOS every user can feel, even if they don't know the bowels of the beast.

Has anyone switched from one to another for a particular reason?

I switched from paper (and filofax) to NewtonOS. The reason is that I get a lot of time to do other things.

Maybe rather than why we like our PDA, you want to know what for we use it.

I take my Newton with me everytime I took my filofax or paper with me in the past: when I visit customers, when I attend seminars, when I go to the public library. When not with me, my Newton is serving web pages, so if I need to note something down and there is an internet access, I just type it and the note is saved on my Newton as if I wrote it with the pen (without the nice graphics/charts you can make with the shape recognizer, though).

Sometimes, some friends/contacts/customers want some info I have on my Newton. I just select them, say I want to e-mail them (I don't have a cell phone) and once close to an internet access, I plug the ethernet card and I send all the stuff. You may think this never happens, but I have several megs of data, and people who use paper/palms often want me to send them notes I took on my Newton/data I have on it. It currently happens once a week.

In my opinion, we can divide the PDA use in three categories:

a/ The guy who does things as his father did.
Paper to take notes on, agenda (even better: filofax) for meetings/contacts.
You take paper when you need to take notes, filofax when you only need to add new meetings/names.
Filofax is fine for appointments, you just insert notes into the diary to associate notes to meetings. Paper is a little bit heavy (I mean, you rarely bring all the notes you took for the last 3 years with you), and searching into it takes quite a long time. I remembered what it was when I had to look for something in notes I took before having my Newton. It takes seconds on my Newton to search all this data. Besides, the Newton can do a global search thru all the programs installed on it, even third party programs. It works like a charm. If I search Marx on my Newton, I have the quotes by Marx I have entered in the Quotes application, notes I took in Economics, and word processor documents I have which talks about Marx (some are actually not about Karl but about the Marx Brothers), and pages of the Universalis Encyclopaedia I have on my Newton.

b/ The guy who has a Palm because his boss/colleague has one as well.
A Palm to have the contacts always with oneself. You try the first two days to take notes on it. When you typed three words for a 2 hours seminar (in fact, at the coffee break), you realize it's the best tool to summarize data.
You also spend so much time to enter meetings/contacts, that you prefer to enter them on the desktop computer and use a good synchronize software to put them on the Palm.
At guys-who-do-like-the-boss-or-the-colleague parties, you exchange data with other fellow Palm users. You lurk at this colleague who is able to enter four words an hour with Graffiti while your personal record is 2 and a half.
In the subway/at the dentist, you get your palm out to play games.
All that, your phone can do it as well. You are not a layman, you know the value of redundancy. If one device goes out of battery, you still have a backup unit.
You have the drawbacks of paper as well, since you can't reasonably think about taking real notes to the Palm.

c/ The guy who wants to optimize the use of his tools.
A Newton to take notes (and hold several years of them), to store when meetings take place, to store the list of contacts, to hold technichal data at hand, to print (including IrDA) and fax.
A brain/post-its to remember the address/code/phone numbers of the person you're visiting.

As you guessed it, I'm rather of the third kind. I have half a dozen of small sheets of paper as big as post-its in my jacket for the people I'm visiting regularly, as well as two pens. I very rarely use them to write things down once I'm out, except to make cheques (you can't make cheques with a Palm AFAIK).
This way, nobody (i.e. people in parties) knows I'm a developer. Especially since I usually have a book in my jacket as well, because I don't play computer games (in the subway or at the dentist). You may think it's better to be known as a nerd or a geek. In fact, I came to the conclusion that it's not. It's just that now that I tell people I study philosophy and economics (which is true, btw) less people ask me to help them with their Windoze (or Palm) related problems. So I earn even more time

You can also envisage the solution with a Palm and a Newton, using Claris Organizer to synchronize data between both or use IrDA directly with backtalk.

Paul

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Newton Evangelist and developer: http://www.kallisys.com/newton/

[This message has been edited by Paul Guyot (edited 05-04-2001).]

[rambo47]

I use a Palm Vx for a calendar and phone book at work. I recently got a modem for it with Omnisky wireless service. Pretty cool being able to check email while on the train commuting to work in the mornings. I also have a Newton 2100 (upgraded 2000) that I'd love to use but the size holds me back. I'm thinking of transitioning to the Newton full time however. I took it to Disney to keep up with my email while I was away and the Newton did everything I wanted, even faxing!

The color Palms hold little attraction for me. I fooled around with a friend's Journada 548 and loved it. Yeah, I know, WinCE blows chunks, but the screen and applications were phenomenal! Makes the color Palms look like real crap. Don't get me wrong, I love my Palm for it's simplicity as a date book and it's stability overall. But if you're talking color screen the pocket pc's are the state of the art.

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iDisk: rseijas
Homepage: homepage.mac.com/rseijas

[mikithecrackhead]

I have a visor deluxe and I love it. I see no reason to switch to another device or platform. The only thing I would get is more springboards. I have 8mg flash, eyemodule and a gotype keyboard.
( I use it for is to sync with my ibook when the original cradle is unavailable. The smaller size keyboard makes it a chore to type in- I should have gotten the stowaway. It works though and I have gotten used to graffiti.)

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when all else fails, read the instructions.

[TimmyDee51]

I use a Newton 2100 (upgraded) for all the reasons listed above. It's simply the best. I can take notes in lectures and the HWR keeps up with me! In plain handwriting! It organizes, it writes, it plays, it does everything.

[Bockie]

Any other opinions/reasons for the Newton 2100?

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"Life cannot be contained...Life finds a way."
-Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park (movie version)

[sine -''-..-]

well one thing us as mac users can appreciate is the 'soul' of the computers we use. i use mac because of its feel and inherant 'soul' of sorts, and with the newton it is quite the same. the os is so intuitive it might as well be your own mind... at least for me it is such. minor errors notwithstanding, the newton interface and platform as a whole is so self integrated, and so user focused, it is like no other machine. the palm is so 'dumb' and mechanical, it is a pain for me to use. the newton seems to kno what you want, from the way it erases, to the way it draws, to the way you navigate its documents.

yes prehaps the preceeding was very dramatic, but the newton os is really the most useable i have ever experienced, and i beleive many ppl feel the same. and with a pda, a unit you Always have with you, such things are essential.

[Paul Guyot]

I confirm what Sine says, and in fact, I think it's even more than that, but maybe it's because I also have a developer approach to the Newton.

When I do something on any computer, I usually think of possible improvements of the way the interface is designed, just to fit more the use I make of the computer. For example, haven't you ever thought it could be nice to have several clipboards on your desktop computer when you did a heavy copy/paste operation?

This kind of thought also happens when you are using the Newton. But in most case, there is a way to do what you want and optimize the use of the computer. In the case of multiple clipboards, it's a hidden feature a lot of developers discovered (and actually, before I discovered that it was a hidden feature by finding a software which enables it, I thought of implementing it as I usually do on any computer). Besides, the way it's conceived (you drag things to the border of the screen and they are clipped there, you draw them back to where you want to paste them) makes the Newton implementation of multiple clipboards the easiest ever, while I have tried and abandonned the Mac hacks enabling multiuple clipboards (but now, what we need is rather a software to have clipboard compatibility between MacOS emulator and OpenSTEP, but that's another story).

You might think the Mac is easy to use. What's behind the ease of use of the Mac is in fact that everything behinds the same way, so if you know a software, another software will behave the same. There is that of course in NewtonOS, but why the Newton is even more easy to use is that it actually behaves more like YOU would do.

Another example of this Newton Intelligence is the route button. On MacOS, you print something by selecting the Print item in the File menu. It normally applies to the frontmost window. If you have a fax software, you need to select it in the chooser, or use a modifier with a terrible hack which actually sometimes crashes your apps.
On the Newton, there is the route button. The route button shows transports applicable to your data. Transports are things such as Beam (IR transfer), Print, Mail, Fax, and anything else a developer could enable (e.g. show in browser for the NotePad, speak using Macintalk, Upload to FTP, etc.). All this is actually transparent to the application, and the author of the application just has to define functions to export the data to text (in fact, it's more or less built-in) or the way to print the data just as a Mac application would do. On the Mac, to speak a document, you need to have it coded in the application. To mail it, you need to select the file in an e-mail software.

There are tons of other examples of the advance of NewtonOS over the existing OSes.

When I say that, many people think a PDA cannot have a decent OS. Indeed, if you look at PalmOS, it's not really an OS as we hear it for desktop computers. But NewtonOS is a real OS. With preemptive multi-threading, protected memory and so on.

And unfortunately, Apple preferred to go back to old rusty notions, but it's another problem.

Paul

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Newton Evangelist and developer:
http://www.kallisys.com/newton/

[mikithecrackhead]

maybe what sine and paul said/say is true. but I have not even seen a n apple pda let alone trying to get one. I understand that the creaters of apple newton ( the pioneer of the pda) left and create palm then later handspring. But the newton is dead
you guys have pics I would really like to see a picture of the palm's parents and visor's grandparents.

[anthology123]

I use an Upgraded MP2000 and I like the NewtOS because of the way the Calendar can access the Names list. Also the Assist function, you can just enter a reminder, like "Meet John Doe for lunch this Wednesday" And it creates a calendar entry in Dates, grabbing John Doe's name from your address book, creating an appt. the nearest Weds, and entering it in the noon-time spot. Although I suppose Outlook can do all that, too. Then again the Newton didn't transfer viruses' all by itself to your address book list.

[Paul Guyot]

Miki, there are plenty of pictures of the Newton on the web.
My favorite is this one:


Check also the Newton Gallery.

BTW, I can't let you say that the creators of the Newton went to Palm and then Handspring. You are meaning more or less that the Palm is the heir of the Newton. Frankly, it got the bad part of the genetics in that case.

Look at the Hall Of Fame. How many of the founding fathers are/were working for Palm?

Paul

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Newton Evangelist and developer:
http://www.kallisys.com/newton/

[Bockie]

So how much do you think a Newton 2100 is worth? (...yes, I've looked on ebay but I wanted some MacNNers' price quotes)

Is it cost effective to buy a used PDA (Newton) or go with a new on (Palm/Visor)?

What is the expected usable life-span for a Newton 2100? Does it have any major hardware flaws that would cause it to wear out? (excluding normal screen usage with the stylus)

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"Life cannot be contained...Life finds a way."
-Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park (movie version)

[nigeljedi]

I've heard so much here about the Newton. But, being as though it is no longer produced and is a little out of date (by today's standards), how would it compare to the newest PDA's on the market? Now, don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a Newton...I would assume as much as I love my Macs, because I do really enjoy using Apple products, but realistically, how well would a Newton keep up with today? I've never had the pleasure of using one, let alone actually seeing one in person, so I don't have much reference here.


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Enjoy Sunny Graphics/Illustration

[mikithecrackhead]

niiiiice , thanks for the pic, hey paul your' in the hall of fame!

[syndicate1024]

I got my newton 2100 for 460

[Paul Guyot]

Ronnie Simon just wants to sell a MP2000. Here is his message:

Ladies/Gents
I have access to a messagepad 2000 with (9W adapter,
leather carry case and keyboard), please contact me via email directly if
you are interested.
Suggested price around $350 plus shipping.

If you are interested, mail me, I'll forward to Ronnie. If he hasn't sold it yet, since 350 USD is pretty cheap for a MP2000. I highly suggest having it upgraded to 2100. David Watson (a.k.a. Dr Newton) does it in the US. Maybe Oliver Harm from PixSolution which is based in Germany still does it.

Now, to answer specifically to nigeljedi, I don't know any today's standard the Newton is out of date by which you might need on a PDA. Please tell me, this can be fixed.

And BTW, loving the Newton isn't loving Apple's products, at least, not today's Apple products. I'm fed up with Apple products, I'm a Newton addict nevertheless.

Miki, yes, I'm in the HoF. But it's not what I meant. It's the only page where you can find the bios of the most important fathers of the Newton such as the HWR system designers or Walter Smith who is responsible for large parts of the OS. Walter now works for Microsoft. So does Steve Capps.

Paul

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Newton Evangelist and developer:
http://www.kallisys.com/newton/