Before, they were called PDAs and they've existed since the late 80s. Apple wasn't late, they were simply waiting for the technology arrive to do it right.
The PC1 was a pocketable computer (mostly used as a word processor) but it wasn't a PDA. Scully popularized the term PDA; Newton did quite a lot that presaged the current generation of devices and made it clear what they were good for. Most notably, Newton was one of the first handheld devices to give up the keyboard in exchange for an entirely screen-based UI, which demanded new metaphors and interaction models. The most notable contemporary was the Casio Zoomer, but there really wasn't anything else in the Newton's class at the time.
Here's an amusing blow-by-blow comparison of the Newton to the iPhone:
Apple's Newton was "a win" for Apple in the sense that it proved the viability of the PDA as a category and, like I said, pioneered all these new concepts - doing things more elegantly or impressively in a smaller package than had been done before. I still miss some of the features Newton had and hope one day to get a product that brings them back.
(FWIW, I worked in the Newton Systems Group on the 2.x operating system and wrote the paint program NewtPaint)
I still have my Newton and my HP-48SX. Yeah, the Newton was clearly ahead of its time. Maybe the main thing that "made" the iPhone was connectivity (and ofcourse having the "Internet" to connect to) - neither were really there for the Newton (or other PDAs for that matter). It's those intersections in technology Internet/Celluar network/Hardware/Software where things take off. An expensive cool PDA without the rest of it is just that. The iPhone was a little bit cheaper (again driven by hardware technologies maturing).
Granted, Apple’s Newton was there before Palm, too, and that work fed into the iPod and iPhone designs. I think it’s a great lesson in how some ideas need time to gel – in this case, you needed multiple generations of improvements on the hardware to get not only viable CPUs but also things like screens with accurate and responsive digitizers to make the UI feel right. PalmOS had some nice features but it was also an old design with unprotected memory so it crashed enough to be annoying and even when the mobile CPUs were ready the software was a huge undertaking.
On the social side, we also needed a big shift in usage. When the Palm or Newton designs were being made, wireless networking wasn’t common the way it is now and especially people weren’t used to using software the way we take for granted now. Email was a novelty for most people, business documents were exchanged physically, and mobile gaming was a kid’s pastime. The big thing which made the iPhone 1 so appealing was that everyone had spent the previous decade finding things they wanted to do on the web and then you could take that with you anywhere. People who were looking at the traditional PDA usage thought it’d fail since it didn’t have a Blackberry keyboard.
It's interesting that both the Newton and Cube--which the article correctly points out as unsuccessful financially--still have cult followings. From what I've read, the Newton--which is, I believe, the first PDA--did many things better than any PDA since, including the iPhone.
Not just the Newton and palmpilot but the the PocketPC phones that came immediately before it.
When the iPhone came out i had an HTC TyTN 2 which unlike the iPhone could do turn by turn navigation, send SMS/MMS to multiple recipients, and act as a 3g modem for my computer while i was traveling. I also adored the pull out keyboard, which until the advent of swype was by far the fastest input method for a mobile device.
There are over 15 years of PDAs before the iPhone. It didn't appear out of thin air. It was an evolution from Newton->Palm Pilot->Clie->Windows CE PDAs->Sony Clie->iPhone
Yes, it was the one that got everything right and it did bring about a revolution but it was evolutional step. It shipped with cellular data (all previous PDAs it was optional). It had an interface designed for a finger rather than a stylus. But, if you were a geek and had PDA from 1995 though 2007 you had already had a PDA in your pocket, where already sending emails from your pocket, browsing the internet, downloading apps, etc...
AR will follow some similar progression. Today's AR is too large (same as Newton), with a bad display (same as Newton), too expensive (same as Newton), crappy OS (same as Newton). But someone will get it right eventually and bring about an AR revolution.
"a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them."
Hmmm. I'm still using my Palm Centro phone, which used to be a Treo, which used to be a Palm PDA, which used to be a Palm Pilot. All of those have a touch oriented UI, and most if not all of them pre-date iPhone by years.
So now I guess we can watch the debate about whether Newton or its competitors pre-date each other.
I was already using a PDA by that time (pocket PC), and the technology was already there, so not like it came out overnight. The only thing Apple improved on was the UX.
Saying "the tablet vision is from MS" is a bit of an overstatement. The party mentioned would have been in 2005. Apple had released the Newton in 1993 (after having worked on it for many years) and refined it over the next 5 years, inspiring a raft of competitors including Palm (whose first product was software for the Newton) and Microsoft. The Apple MessagePad 2000 (released in 1997) had an entirely tap-based interface with no dedicated hardware buttons - the whole interface was whatever you saw on the screen. The initial vision for the Newton was that it would be a tablet OS that could scale to a variety of sizes - "from a post-it pad to a whiteboard" - the actual sizes released were driven by market considerations at the time.
So Microsoft's efforts might possibly have given Apple the kick in the pants it needed to try AGAIN at a tablet OS at that specific time, but the reason they could do it so quickly and effectively once the decision was made is that Apple had already iterated through the design issues and had stuff along those lines already working in the labs.
Also, Jobs's 50th birthday party would have been in 2005, but the "Project Purple" team that worked in earnest to release iPhone was formed in 2004. And the iPhone took three years to develop (as dated from the formation of that team), not 6 months. So I don't think this story really works on any level. Maybe Steve remembered it wrong - it's more likely he was sitting on the knowledge of what his team had already done in secret and it was killing him not to say anything about it, making the moment especially memorable.
Do people these days not even remember PDAs or is this willful blindness? Apple has some claim to being early on the scene wiith hanheld computers but not with the iPhone.
In addition to the already mentioned quotes and biography, Apple had nearly 30 years of research in the space [1]; you've probably heard of the (failed) Newton. At some point in 200x, they decided to try one more time, this time as a smartphone. It kind of worked.
> Windows CE based Wizard style PDAs predate the Apple Newton
Newton came out in '93 and WinCE came out in '96. But that nitpick doesn't take away from your general point. MSFT seems to be good at coming out with things that have potential, but then let's them languish. Their mobile products were a prime example. On the last WinMo phone I had (2006-ish), the OS had dialogs that were (I assume) user-drawn and going on ten years old. Those dialogs looked like it, too. Apple comes along with a platform they were willing to pour the company into, and MSFT has been playing catch-up since.
You say they don't make their products "good enough", I'd argue that Microsoft doesn't stick with their products long enough to make them good enough. Their wireless home phone system (can't find a link) was an example. V1.0 was rough around the edges, but useable and forward-thinking for the late 90's. v2.0 was going to be great, except there never was a 2.0.
I always wonder how a Newton would perform on modern hardware. Considering how well the handwriting recognition worked on 90s hardware it should be pretty great by now. I definitely miss it. The iPhone feels like a step backwards in terms of user and developer friendliness.
Before, they were called PDAs and they've existed since the late 80s. Apple wasn't late, they were simply waiting for the technology arrive to do it right.
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