![]() WIRED wrote in its iPhone 4S review that "Siri is the reason people should buy this phone." Siri improved by leaps and bounds over the years. Some saw it as a gamechanger, others dismissed it as just another attempt to cash in on the voice recognition trend. Siri arrived as a standalone app in 2010, and was acquired by Apple that same year. And just like the Newton MessagePad, it divided opinions. Where Newton relied on text-based input, Siri made the leap to voice recognition. It was a smart assistant by definition, something that is now synonymous with Siri on the iPhone. Scribbling "Lunch with Sophia on Sunday" pulled up the calendar and made an automatic entry after the user's consent. Writing a statement such as "Fax to Allen" at the end of a note would evoke a prompt for sending it to a person named Allen in the contacts directory. Walt Mossberg wrote for The Wall Street Journal that the iPhone was "a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer."Īnother pioneering aspect of the Newton software was what Apple called "intelligence assistance." It essentially tried to understand what users wrote on the screen and turned said writings into actionable commands. It was a pocketable computer, in all essence. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone over a decade later, it was seen as more than just a phone with cool tricks up its sleeve. When Apple chief John Sculley was first pitched the idea of a handheld computing device, he wanted it to be small enough for the pocket and could be held comfortably in one hand, per a WIRED report. It's worth starting with the form factor. And yet, its influence on the iPhone is undeniable. What it promised was revolutionary, but what it delivered was a potpourri of half-baked features and misfiring tech. The Newton MessagePad catalyzed a new category of computers called PDAs, short for Personal Digital Assistants. And to some extent, in the world's favorite tablet - the iPad. It was deemed a colossal failure, but part of it lives on in the iPhone. Thankfully, the industry learns from its mistakes, and today the pen is a valuable tool for all types of personal computing applications.The oft-maligned Apple Newton MessagePad was an innovation ahead of its time when it first arrived in 1993. ![]() Pen computing failed in the early 1990s, and it has taken close to 30 years for the technology to evolve and make pen computing useful. Pen computing is now part of most Windows OS PC experiences and is used in Android tablets and some Samsung smartphones. It also helped them develop the current Apple Pen and the powerful software that converts written script into text much better than it did on Newton. It helped them fine-tune the concept of using touch for navigation on the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. While Apple's Newton Message Pad was a failure, Apple learned a great deal from this experience. Palm Pilot had significant success in early pen computing, while Apple and all the others failed. The Palm Pilot introduced the term PDA or personal digital assistant into our tech vocabulary and became a successful product that blazed the trail for today's pen-based input computing devices. Once a user learned to write a letter that the Palm Pilot would recognize, it turned it into digital text instantly. So Jeff and his team created an OS that included a written script for a digital text conversion program called Graffiti. Jeff explained that you need to learn to write a letter in the manner the pen computer can recognize for it to be accurately converted into digital text. After working at GridPad and learning a great deal about the written script to digital text conversion, he said the technology still needs to arrive to make that work. He emphatically told me Newton would be a big failure. However, when sharing how the Palm Pilot worked and describing the special software he created that taught a user how to write a letter the way the Palm Pilot would recognize it, he made an essential prediction about Apple's Newton. He then showed me a prototype of the first commercial Palm Pilot. He began our discussion by showing me a wooden carving he had made of the Palm Pilot design. He had started a company called Palm Computing and wanted to show me a new product he was working on called the Palm Pilot. We had met together when he previously worked at GridPad. Not long after the Newton Message Pad was released, I met with Jeff Hawkins.
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