I think one of the first topics this webblog concerned itself with was the Apple Newton Messagepad and my efforts to obtain one. Well as is obvious from those early posts, I did get my hands on one and the little devil has been my favourite toy around the Law Library ever since. When other products simply fail to meet up to the standards of a piece of technology that was last manufacture in 1997 you have good reason to go 'retro'.
I love 'Denning', my MP2100 dearly but he's always had one problem and that is his inability to keep up with lectures. See I type at over 60 wpm but my handwriting is appallingly slow. I've long argued that exams today ought to allow candidates the use of a keyboard attached to a no frills word processor without a spell checker but sadly I'll probably have to wait till my children reach exam age for that luxury to be afforded to students. In my experience, styli based input is always inferior to a good old-fashioned 'QWERTY' keyboard.
The Newton had and indeed still does have the world's best handwriting recognition system, but it doesn't make up for my complete inability to write at a decent pace or to a decent standard of legibility, most people achieve at least 98% accuracy with their Newton's Handwriting Recognition, I get more like 65%. That may be acceptable for casual notation but when you're in a lecture and you want to take notes you can't really keep up. What is needed is a keyboard.
The Newton did have a keyboard accessory built by Apple but it's notoriously hard to get hold of and quite expensive (about £50 normally). However I've had the good fortune to find one on eBay going for a very low price as a result of a missing key ( '0' as it happens but I rarely have to use that number in Legal Notation ;) ). If I'm lucky enough to win the auction (and it would seem I will be) then I'll be able to take notes with a keyboard without having to buy myself an iBook and Denning will have a new lease on life.
As I wrote earlier this month I'm really enjoying Bluetooth so I'm particularly intrigued by this man's efforts to get Bluetooth compatibility going for the Newton.
Keeping the Newton compliant with modern standards is nothing new, it already has full support for ATA flash storage cards which ramp its capacity to an excessive maximum of several Gigabytes when a top of the range Message Pad 2100 only had about 5mb shipping as standard. The MP2100's two PCMCIA slots also mean that it has room for some connectivity to go with your vast storage card, I own a 56k Modem card and Ethernet Card and the MessagePad can also be used with a PCMCIA WiFi 802.11 card for wireless internet access and email.
Nonetheless Bluetooth is by far the coolest thing I could imagine the Newton getting access to in the future and he seems pretty damn close. That'd be an awesome development.
In the meantime I'll just sit and hope I win my auction.