Gadgetory

hey guys John rende you're from TechnoBuffalo here with a feature overview for you of the Newton message pad 2100 by Apple people are asking me why I'm showing a device that's 13 years old that no one has seen for close to a decade and a half and the answer is really simple I think the Newton message pad helped pigs away from uh turn PDAs and smartphones and you'll see why in just a minute also it's interesting to see how Apple really implemented user communication with a tablet or slick device as rumors of Apple's isolate or whatever they're gonna call it are really starting to come to the surface have a handle text input and have the handle controls Without Really many physical buttons and only physical buttons that Newton has is just a power button like it's especially a pertinent to see how they've done in the past maybe get some instances and ideas of how they may do it in the future also some of the designers on Newton projects are supposedly some designers that are working on the isolate so there are a lot of overlapping things there keep in mind this is still a thirteen year old technology so try and keep into perspective how this might have looked back then so what we have right here is the main note screen this is the probably the main thing of the device and what we use use it most for so you answer all your text and handle most of your entries let me go ahead and show you how it works this handles text entries in a few ways the first one I want to show you is via stylus and of course is a resistive touch drink don't even thought of capacitive fact 13 years ago still even 13 years later this is probably some of the best handwriting recognition software I've ever seen it's not entirely accurate but it's very very close and extremely good and how it handles a text interaction editing the text I think is most important let me go ahead and show you it's broken up the two panels right here I've got our recording button down below phone record voice no take advantage of the built-in microphone or a simple text entry right here and go ahead tap the screen that brings up a cursor you can see that a little half carat I could move that around anywhere I want just by tapping I necessarily have to start writing right there but that's where the text appears I'll put it up in the upper left hand corner like I'm actually gonna write a note and we'll just start typing anywhere I want to alright this is a test and you see it starts to populate up there this is a test it got it completely right you can change this to use cursive or regular handwriting my handwriting is a mess anyway so we're gonna stick with this let's go ahead and write something different we'll start it down here and I'm gonna try and write messy so it can see if it makes a mistake or two and we'll write this as a test again service fast and as sloppy as I can so didn't even get that close so let's say I want to edit one of the words I wrote this is endo are not quite close and I want this to say test at the end well I got you right right over the letters it's a really cool way to correct text you have to move your cursor highlight the letter and then start typing you actually just right right over it so let's make that entity for example now it's a team make that D and E comes in E and now suddenly it says this is a test pretty neat so how do you handle so many other text entries how do you delete or copy or move stuff around well let me show you how to do that we'll deal with this piece at the top if I tap to the left of it make that a little squeaky noise I can actually drag the cursor and it highlights the text now if I just tap it I can move it anywhere I want and if I double tap and move it's actually gonna copy it for me oops go ahead and delete this little try this piece of text right here you know copied it so I've got these bits of text everywhere how do I delete them well just the way you really knew water and expect you to sort of scribble over it and I'll delete it for you some things you have to highlight to the leaf first some you don't but generally I found it works best if you're going to highlight the text so it's pretty intuitive actually to work and erasing just sort of start drawing over them and they will all disappear all so it's kind of satisfied at scribble you hear that animation you see the animation and the text or image disappears there are a few other ways to input text as well let me show you what those are so this is really one of the earlier devices to have a on-screen keyboard and it's sort of big I don't think you can type with your fingers but it's not bad for using a stylus so I'll try that again and see how quickly we can go so you get this is a test again you get that sort of keyboard or a typewriter sounding noise nothing you know that revolutionary but at the time thirteen years ago it was pretty neat to have this sort of text entry we'll go ahead and delete that we're going to close or closer rather by that X in the bottom right corner sort of weird to see an Apple device with the X but that's how it worked now you can also go ahead and delete this here now you can also draw shapes and Newton does a really cool job of recognizing shapes and actually if you're fixing them for you I'll show you how that works as well so I hit this button right here it looks like an A I can go to shapes and now I can start drawing some shape so I'm gonna draw it say a circle the best I can I'm certainly no artist but solid the Newton corrected it to make it more of a round circle try and make this one look a little less circling so you're sailing in dude and sort of brought it together they're gonna fix it in a trace sir square squared it will try a rectangle so it made it look a little better you know same thing with triangles it'll just make them look a little bit better and things work the same as far as highlighting and moving things around if you'd like or even just drawing right on top of it it's pretty neat actually sort of move the triangle anywhere you want if you were doing floor plans with the example of what I would want something like this if we doing graphing to make it look a little more exact and again a lot of this seems like yeah of course but keep in mind again this is 13 years ago so in fact the device do this was really cool this is really before palm and the palm pilots started coming around and even had some sort of handwriting recognition even then they had a set formula you had to follow the dryer letters those it might remember the old Palm Pilot even the old trios you can already want the draw key you had to follow a very exact pattern to draw your letters if you deviated from that pattern that the text wouldn't recognize here you can really draw letters any way you want it and it works quite well the different does a lot of other things as well you can do a lunch tray some of them here you go to new it's can do an outline for example if you are in class you'll have to take notes it's great for doing bullet points so you can select icon your outlines to be where they're indented how you want them set up or a new one so I just sit in class you can start typing and it'll pull it right up there you know this class sucks it's really probably what I would have written oh and I was sitting in class so there's a lot of other things that you can do you can move this part down so you don't want to record you can have full access to the screen the Newton really did a lot one of the biggest drawbacks of a Newton I'm gonna pan back just a bit is these sides of this thing this is nothing that you could just throw in your pocket I mean it was really big and very thick as you can see it's something you definitely want to keep in your bag and just hope that nothing would happen to it it was a very cool device and I'm really enjoying playing with it I'll come back in this video series and show you some other things that Newton does and I'll just give you sort of a sense of maybe how Apple handled text input in the past on a tablet and I'll hand Apple may handle in the future with their isolate or ever they're going to call their new tablet so I hope you guys enjoyed the sort of flashback of look at some old Apple technology it doesn't get much love this was the last Newton message pad that came out with a 2100 I ran just about a thousand dollars when it was released which is sort of the same price point we're hearing about for Apple's new tablet you know it could play a kind of your sounds back to the speaker built-in microphone showed many shades of gray of just quite neat older models didn't really have this virtual icon array across the bottom so the the message pad had some very we'll in advanced technology for its time had some features that really are impressive right now you know this had copy and paste the iPhone it was launched didn't even have that you know there's a lot of talk being made over the advantage of a capacitive touchscreen I certainly agree I think capacitive but certainly the future and a more advanced way to interact with the touch Bernie but we are dealing with the resistive you do get to use a stylus for better or worse this is one of the better stand points we can actually can write right on the screen so I don't know how bad was gonna be able to do some sort of finger writing whether you could write with just your fingertip I don't think that would work so well but maybe it'll be a virtual keyboard and maybe would be even that weird bumpy haptic keyboard we saw them Pat but just for fun I'm gonna try typing with Marv writing with my finger and see how that would work if I was using that capacitive touch screen without the stylus so right off the bat you can see that it's much harder to write small I really had to write as big as I could it's having a hard time recognizing it because it's completely inaccurate so you can definitely get a sense that maybe using your finger to write actual tech to be difficult so we'd have to imagine we'll see some sort of virtual keyboard on the new tablet an apple is supposedly releasing we're going to announce at the beat end of January anyway guys hope you enjoyed it and John R Ettinger from TechnoBuffalo for all your tech news and to commit your own tech blog and monetize it be sure to check out TechnoBuffalo comm for exclusive content and get in early on some contests and cool giveaways check me out at twitter twitter.com slash john 4-leggers I'll see you the next video bye bye