The MessagePad 110 offers improved portability over the Original MessagePad with a smaller display and flip over screen protector that resembles the front cover on a reporter’s notepad. In March 1994, at the same time the MessagePad 100 was released, Apple updated the Newton form factor with the introduction of a new model. But real work on a MessagePad requires real character recognition, and these original MessagePads just don’t offer the versatility or the recognition to make them anything more than collector’s items. The golden screen color, graceful curves, and soft touch casing of the Original MessagePads make these two models some of the most attractive Newtons ever made.
APPLE NEWTON CLAMSHELL SOFTWARE
Things got better one year later with the release of the MessagePad 100 which added individual character recognition, but both MessagePads are limited by their early software that can’t accept many later Newton applications. Using an Original MessagePad for taking notes often requires adding unknown words to the dictionary and rewriting them several times before the OMP can decipher them correctly.
got more attention for what it couldn’t do than what it could.īeing a word based recognizer Calligrapher can only decipher words that are in its dictionary and even then it has to be trained for several weeks before it gets proficient. Unfortunately Calligrapher the word-based handwriting recognition engine in the Newton which was developed by the Soviet programmers at Paragraph International Inc. Names, Dates, To Dos, Notes, and the ability to send simple faxes and emails are the OMP’s killer features, but its premature software, and inadequate cursive handwriting recognizer Calligrapher, limit its usefulness as a MessagePad. Image Credit: Jonathan Zufi, ĭespite having similar technical specifications as later Newtons the OMP is limited to the kind of personal information management we attribute to yesterday’s PDAs or today’s most rudimentary mobile phones. It’s release was somewhat premature and it is referred to by some Newton faithful as the ‘grand public beta test’. The OMP (Original MessagePad) was unveiled and released on Augat MacWorld Boston. Choosing a Newton requires understanding each models benefits and weaknesses and applying that knowledge towards selecting the Newton that best meets your requirements. Each form factor was an evolutionary step forward for the platform, and introduced design considerations and features that were different from past and subsequent models. This article is written by my friend Thomas Brand, who blogs at .Īpple released four distinct Newton form factors containing eight different models between August 1993 and February 1998.
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