Slashdot Log In
Apple Newton vs Samsung Q1 UMPC
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jul 28, 2006 08:36 AM
from the ready-fight dept.
from the ready-fight dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CNET has run a comparison between the 1997 Apple Newton and a modern Windows ultra mobile PC, the Samsung Q1. Remarkably, the Newton comes off as the winner. From the article: 'An operating system designed for a desktop computer will rarely shoehorn well into a portable device, yet that is exactly what Samsung has tried to do with the Q1. Very little consideration has been given to the differing priorities of desktop and small-form computer users. Windows is a one-size-fits-all solution, whereas the Newton OS is very specifically built for the efficient use of a small screen and stylus.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Not compared (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not compared (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a pda, a 4Gig SD card in it for storage and a full GPS with the best dataset I can get. Having the gps with not only road data but store, hotel and resturant data is far more valuableto a travelling schlep.
Re:Not compared (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, I do not view the Newtown as the winner, the way that TFA is written it is more that the Q1 is the loser.
I've often thought that OSX would make a good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I've often thought that OSX would make a good (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I've often thought that OSX would make a good (Score:3, Insightful)
"Winner?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Winner?" (Score:4, Interesting)
Furthermore, get a load of this gem: "It would be easy to dismiss the Newton's greyscale screen as inferior to the Q1's full-colour display, but Apple's choice of a greyscale LCD is one of the reasons the Newton enjoys over 30 hours of continuous battery life, compared to the Q1's 2.5 hours." WTF? This is biased reviewing at its best. An LCD screen should be reviewed based on the qualities of the goddamned screen. Which display is sharper? Which is brighter? Which is clearer? Which screen allows more versatility? Battery life is a separate goddamned category. It should not be a factor in deciding which screen is better than another unless all other things are equal--which they clearly are not. The entire review is basically the reviewers saying: "Yeah, the Q1 is really nice, but we want a PDA, and that's not what the Q is, so Apple wins."
Parent
Re:"Winner?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually this is a really important. You don't want to be finding yourself a power socket to charge your PDA every two and half hours. Gray scale screens are usually very high quality in commparison to colour screens, with the omission of colour.
The entire revue is probably biased, but the general gist is that if you think of how your device will be used you will be better off. Trying to fudge a solution may provide a working solution, but not necessarily one which is worth using. The fact that the Newton is still being using by people today is a testiment to how well it was thought out - what was against it were: size, price and the fact it was too early to market for most.
Parent
Re:"Winner?" (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:"Winner?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:"Winner?" (Score:3, Informative)
True, but the way the article was written each side tries to defend its position round by round. While the pro-Newton side made that argument in the screen round, Newton was judged to have lost that round.
Re:"Winner?" (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:"Winner?" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a tiny screen and fully half the screen is toolbars.
This article is really about the modern portables industry going off-mission, and sacrificing core features of portables in favour of gimmicks. The Samsung machine tries to be a swiss army knife of portable computing, and it does everything it claims, but it lacks the most important aspects of such a mini toolkit: portability. 2.5 hours isn't portable, that won't even last you a flight of any distance, and it actually places an upper limit on the length of movies you can watch with it's much praised video playing capabilities (chances are it's more like 2 hours with something as processor intensive anyway). The prime advantage of this is that you can amend, for example, powerpoint presentations last minute. But then you could already do it much better and faster on an ordinary laptop.
Remember those swiss army knifes? On the one hand you get the ones with 6 or 7 fold out tools... A mini toolkit in your pocket, very useful. Then you get the one with 150 tools that's so bulky you wouldn't want to carry it around in your pocket, and so it sits unused in your toolbox where you have better tools anyway.
Parent
Odd evaluations (Score:3, Insightful)
"The Samsung logo at the bottom of the unit, the SRS surround-sound logo
So the Q1 wins for having lots of prominent logos? Logos = massive potential? I'm sure glad this guy doesn't design iPods.
anything (Score:4, Interesting)
UMPC = Stupid Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
I love my Newton (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I love my Newton (Score:4, Interesting)
Why? How could the Newton be made better and still be a Newton? Color? Don't need it. Memory and processor? Got beacoup for a PDA. Wifi and bluetooth would be nice, but with two PCMCIA card slots, that's not a big problem.
All we really need is updated software.
The two things that Newton got wrong were price and form factor. I'll be a bit heretical here and say that price was probably the bigger issue in its market failure. People aren't going to snap up any mobile computing platform for $1000 unless it's a laptop.
Form factor is a two edged sword. The Newton was far to big for a address book and calendar device. But it is far better for viewing text and entering data than any pocket PDA.
If the Newtwon were available today for less than $200, it would create its own application niches.
Parent
Re:I love my Newton (Score:5, Insightful)
It could be made thinner, and the borders around the screen could be made smaller. The handwriting recognition could probably be improved slightly.
Using the Newton UI is a kind of Zen. Everything it does is so obvious you wonder how anyone could possibly conceive of any other way of doing things. You write some text on the screen, and the text is added there. You draw a square, and you get a square. The only way I can see some someone being surprised at a Newton beating a Windows machine is if they had never used a Newton.
Parent
How to improve Newton (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Built in WiFi and Bluetooth.
3. Make it slightly smaller and lighter. May require shift to AAA instead of AA. I'd settle for any size larger than any current Palm OS PDA but smaller than the 2100.
4. Give it USB instead of serial.
5. Make it work with iSync and define an open communications protocol.
6. Maybe a higher resolution grayscale screen.
7. Faster CPU.
8. PDF support and web browser in the core OS.
I'd buy the result for pretty much any amount of money up to $1000, seriously. I don't care if people in general want it to be less than $200, I don't see anything on the market that competes so I'm prepared to pay more.
It's a damn tragedy that the Newton was killed by Jobs. It's the one thing he's done that I'm still bitter about.
Parent
Re:How to improve Newton (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody seriously considering spending $1000 for a mobile device too big to put in your pocket has to consider a laptop as an alternative. Heck, event the current generation PDAs are competing with laptops. And losing.
That's the problem with adding too many features to a mobile platform. It creates confusion, and undermines the appeal o
It's the usability, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the Newton won -- considering that it runs software custom-designed for mobile PIM use, while the Q1 is more-or-less running normal desktop Windows (tablet edition, whoop-de-do), was there ever any doubt?
Newton Advantages (Score:5, Insightful)
I wrote a bit about this before [blogspot.com]. The Newton does a lot of things well as it was designed from the ground up to be a hand-held device. As a consequence it's still seeing use, still seeing third-party development, and still more usable than some devices currently getting produced.
It's not ideal, either; it could definitely use a diet to shed some weight, and these days features like wireless, bluetooth, etc. shouldn't have to be added via cards. An evolutionary development of the Newton platform could easily beat almost any other device on the market today, though.
Re:Newton Advantages (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Newton Advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Newton Advantages (Score:3, Funny)
Q: What's two plus two?
A: Farm
MS falls victim to one of the classic blunders (Score:5, Informative)
How many situations do you know of where something that was a good solution to one problem has now become the default solution to every problem? It's the old saw about when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
When you choose Windows as your OS, every device works like a desktop. It doesnt' matter that the screen is tiny, you use the "desktop" metaphor and the "Start" menu. It doesn't matter that there's limited memory and a slow processor, you use the Windows applications (lite versions, but still bloatware). This is why I've never seriously considered a WinCE device, even though I've owned a PDA since 2000 and a phone/PDA combo since 2004, and two of the computers in my house run Windows.
I want something that's designed for the use it's being put to -- fit for purpose, we used to call it. If Microsoft's vaunted usability expertise were real, they would have abandoned the "Mini Windows" metaphor on mobile devices long ago.
Re:MS falls victim to one of the classic blunders (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MS falls victim to one of the classic blunders (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has poured a lot... a LOT... Of money into it's OS. They want to re-use as much as possible on it, because they want to:
1. Keep costs down.
2. Keep the interface as similar as possible, to minimize learning curve
3. Introduce as few new bugs as possible, and to keep bug hunting down to a minimum when they do crop up.
So Microsoft's hammer is its OS. And it is a very big hammer. Its not even suited to hammer out the nails tha
The Newton Already Lives On... (Score:5, Informative)
Newton still beating them long after it died (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a Cookie ... Fruit and Cake (Score:3, Funny)
Is this the right comparison? (Score:4, Insightful)
LS
Review is meaningless, victory was purely emotiona (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, the Q1 beat the Newton 5 to 3. Although I personally think the Q1 should have won the Price point also as you can not buy a new Newton like the one they tested. So it just comes down to the editor being a Mac fan or Windows hater.
-Rick
For people too lazy to RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's an analogy: Q1 = PSP, Newton = 1989 Game Boy.
Reality check. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Q1 is a small tablet (laptop).
The article seemed most interested in their roles as PDAs. OF COURSE the PDA will win.
Let's compare the Newton with some good CE-based handhelds and see what we find.
Review misses the point (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that this feature still is this rare is mindboggling, by the way. What have the world's application developers been doing for the last decade? The future's there for the copying, but instead we get more crap shoveled down our throats.
Answering your rhetorical question (Score:3, Insightful)
Portable video to small to watch
Ability to run desktop apps that are too complex and are unusably slow
Hmmm...oh, and wireless connectivity, because every year batteries get better and everyone want's to stay in that 4 hour "sweet spot"
*shakes head*
Why compare an orange to a 747? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Newton is a PDA. Can you run Photoshop on it? No. Watch video? Not really. Store all your pr0n^C^C holiday snaps? No. If you want to do any of those things (like I do) then the Newton scores -1, the UMPC is +5
At the moment they're good at different tasks. If you want a PDA, buy a PDA. If you're after a PC that fits on your pocket, buy a UMPC (or a Vaio UX, or OQO, or...)
I used my Vaio C1F for many years, I also used a variety of Psion/PocketPC/Palm devices. The C1F I upgraded and want a replacement for, the PDAs were gathering dust pretty much as soon as they arrived home - for me a simple pocket diary works better than a PDA, as it doesn't require batteries, doesn't erase all your data, is smaller, and way cheaper. At the end of the day though, everyone's different.
Former Newton Developer agrees (Score:5, Insightful)
The point made that a desktop OS cannot be easily shoehorned into a smaller place cannot be overstated. Software designs, all software designs, have a "design center" that is the embodiment of the environment the original developers envisioned when they made their design decisions. Go too far from that vision and you find some of the tradeoffs those designers made are no longer best, and now possibly may be very bad indeed.
The Newton's programming environment, based on SELF, was augmented with lots of supporting functionality that made creating high-quality applications for the device pretty easy. But, the MessagePads themselves (and remember: this was about 13 year ago now) had insufficient processor power for the really good stuff. Then again, think back about the kinds of junk that infested Palm Pilots and other hand-helds back then! If the MessagePad had been allowed to grow as a platform as all other surviving brands had done, it would have been a powerhouse.
Finally, as a developer, I must point out that one of the problems that all devices like this face is that developers hate investing time learning a new platform. The Newton faced an extra challenge in that you had to learn a whole new programming language and programming model, too. For those of us who gave it a chance, we found the learning curve to be reasonable and the results satisfying. For many programmers, though, inertia and sheer laziness precludes anything that ventures out of their comfort zone.
This last problem, the lazy programmer problem, has cast shadows on much more than just Newton MessagePad sales.
Not that remarkable (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a shame really, because Steve killed them as much -- I think -- out of spite for John Sculley as anything else. I'm not saying I *blame* him -- I can only BUY a Mac because Steve did what he did -- but the motivation was very clearly personal on some level.
I currently have a Newton 2100... (Score:5, Informative)
I also share the opinion that the handwriting recognition on the Newton is the best I've ever seen. A friend of mine writes fantasy novels in her spare time and with all the weird names and spellings the damn thing had about a 90% recognition rate for her out of the box. And that was without a lot of training up front. And the thing learns so it's only going to get better.
Plus there's still people developing for the Newton - not too many but they're out there.
My only complaint is that the person who wrote the ATA/CF storage drivers [kallisys.com] wants almost $100 per Newton to be able to use large CF cards.
But from that same site people are even emulating the Newton on other hardware [kallisys.com]. That say something in my mind as to how "right" Apple got it with the Newton.
Re:I currently have a Newton 2100... (Score:3, Informative)
How I Miss My Newton (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow, it's a review troll (Score:5, Insightful)
not at all. In this comparison the Model T has a traditional steering wheel and gas/brake pedals. The Ferrari has a laptop trackpad for steering and a strange USB device for breaking and gas that seems to get disconnected at random times and at regular times the steering will either slam the wheels to the right hard for no reason or fail to accept input.
THAT is the difference between a Newton and XP Tablet. The newton was designed from the beginning to be a non keyboard/mouse device. XP is designed ot have a keyboard and mouse and then MSFT slapped some crud into it to work with the other hardware.
It does not work (I have 2 Xp tablets, I hate the XP tablet tools, they simply suck.) and is unreliable at best.
That seems to be a very fair comparison to me with no fishyness.
Parent
Re:Wow, it's a review troll (Score:4, Funny)
However, in this case, a better car analogy would be to compare a '57 Thunderbird [wikipedia.org] (Newton) with a '87 Yugo [cartalk.com] (Q1). Er, a really expensive Yugo. With a really small gas tank. =)
The latest is not always the greatest. People will remember the Newton long long after the Q1 is forgotten. Love it or hate it, it's a computing classic.
Parent
Re:Wow, it's a review troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless the test included driving over a dirt road with ruts eight inches deep. The ability to go 200MPH is meaningless if your tires don't reach the ground.
Mobile coputing platform providers end up competing on features, because that's the only way to lock users into an upgrade cycle. And everybody likes a shiny new feature. But the truth is mobile computing users don't really need more features. What they need is basic capabilities, any time, any place.
The Newton got a lot of things right, and a few critical things wrong. One of the things it got right was battery. That satisifies the any time requirement. One of the things it got wrong was form factor. That fails the anywhere requirement.
It seems to me that creating a more powerful computer in the same form factor but with short battery life is a mistake.
In any case, the Newton is hardly a model T. It's more like a Stanley Steamer: an extraordinary and worthy piece of engineering that failed becuase it didn't meet a key user criterion. For the Stanley, it was the ability to hop in and go without having to literally build up a head of steam. For the Newton, it was the ability to carry it with you without constantly being aware you were lugging a computer around.
Parent
Re:Wow, it's a review troll (Score:4, Insightful)
That and bad press as a result of a too-early release and a rocky start.
However, that makes the article's comparison that much more poignant, because it seems like the technology to build the Newton today would allow it to be about 1/2 the original weight and maybe 75% it's original size. Give it a color screen and WiFi and you'd have a killer machine.
Parent
Re:Wow, it's a review troll (Score:4, Interesting)
I really liked my Newton.
But, I use a Palm m505 now. Why? Mostly size. Color screen is almost not relevant (well, there is one application that I find it useful in - EasyCalc graphing calculator, where I can plot multiple functions, each with its own color.). I could lose the colour.
Speed? The m505 is a 32Mhz 68000, its slower than the Newton. Still gets the job done, and the battery life is good.
Handwriting? I initially thought that the lack of cursive, and graffiti was going to be a killer. Surprisingly, it only took a couple of days to become proficient with grafiti.
Organizer? Here, the Newton wins. Hands down. All information is magically correlated in a Newton. The palm is to... um... "application oriented". It does have cross application search, but it isn't as good. You also have to be IN the application to do something. No random scrawling of instructions, with the knowledge that the PDA will take care of it.
Connectivity? the palm wins (at least with stock Linux distributions).
In conclusion, I use the m505 for its size and linux connectivity (out-of-the-box). If a Newton device were released that brought the size down to m505, and had an "open connectivity" kit for standard linux apps (openoffice), I would switch. Oh -- one more thing. The "IR" feature would have to be standard and be able to beam contacts, notes, etc. to and from my phone (which my m505 does).
The Samsung Q1? Not even in the same league. It won't fit into my "manbag". Its battery life is WAY too short. And its a remarkably poor interface for doing quick PDA things. I don't need fancy, I need super-quick reliable interactions. Even the m505 fails here - it takes SECONDS to jump from calculator to address book. Blech. The Newton was superior. If I need to tell someone "please slow down, my PDA isn't keeping up", or have the urge to capture on scrap paper first, the PDA has failed. The only delay with the Newton was the handwriting recognition -- and the model I had didn't allow deferred recognition.
My perfect PDA:
- palm m505 form factor
- 8+ hours battery life
- newton style software
- linux connectivity
- very fast recognizer, perhaps deferred recognition
- sd slot expansion (two slots)
- wifi and/or bluetooth and IR (compatible)
- vibration
</rant>
Ratboy.
Parent