Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocket now calm and in this video I'm going to show you all the interesting and unique features of the Apple Newton message pad 2100 now if you've been following this series that we've been doing you know that the Newton is about an 11-year old device it's the last Newton that Apple ever made that they came up with it came out in 1997 and it cost $1,000 and the purpose of this of this video series is to see how far we've come and yet how far we haven't come because there is a lot of things that the Apple Newton can do a lot of really intelligent features that we still don't see on mobile devices of today okay so what is the Apple Newton well the way I think about it is like a really advanced note pet and you'll see what I mean by that in a second I'm gonna start by turning it on and there's a switch in the upper left corner and you probably won't be able to see the screen so I'm gonna turn on the backlight and hopefully the backlight won't burn out by the time I'm done with this video the back lights kind of this ugly green color and it there's a little hum coming from the device but it serves the purpose of bringing the bringing some light to the device when you're in a dark room or something like that because obviously it's not backlit like a traditional LCD is so let's start out the the the kind of desktop for the Apple Newton is the notepad application that's where you always go back to whether you're in you're in contacts or calendar or you're faxing something or anything like that and I'm gonna make a new note and show you some things that this can do and how you input data into this so quite simply we can start off by just naturally writing and I have to change the mode down here to text and now I'm going to write on the screen today is Tuesday now looks like the words wrong and I'll show you how to correct that in a second you can write anywhere on the screen and it will always show up where the cursor is so I could have done today is Tuesday I could have done today is Tuesday and so on and so forth now you see I've misspelled the word nor the Newton is misspelled to Tuesday so the way I correct it is quite simply by writing on top of it so that you needs to be an A so I'm gonna do an a changes to an A that period needs to be a Y so I'm going to write on top of that and it corrects it so let's say I want to delete the word Tuesday how do you do it well kind of like in a real notepad you scribble it out so I'm gonna scribble out Tuesday you get this little animation and this whoosh sound and it's off the screen and you can do that with the whole entire sentence or just one word or one letter so it's a really smart way of just simply removing or deleting what you've just written in now you can also type with the on-screen keyboard though I'm sure most people prefer to use the handwriting recognition so if I type today is Tuesday it's a really nice keyboard actually it's quite large it makes this annoying sound every time you type on it but you know you can turn off the sound obviously to close the keyboard and this is kind of a deviation from other mobile devices the close button is in the bottom right and you'll find that to be the case in most of the screens on the Newton so now once we have text on the screen we can do some things with it we can move it around we can copy and paste and other sort of things first thing we have to do is select the text and the way we do that is by clicking and holding and then dragging the selection line through the text or the shape as we'll see soon that you want to manipulate so I'm going to tap down and you're all through now I can move this around if I want I can place this anywhere on the page if I want to copy it or duplicate it I double tap and slide so watch this double tap and slide double tap and slide the iPhone still doesn't have copy and paste but the Newton can do it here and let's say I want to undo that last copy there's an undo button on the bottom here but unfortunately it only goes back one undo compared to you know other devices and uh you know on your computer you can go back many different times so I'm going to erase everything that's on the screen here so I can show you another feature now another thing that you can do in the Newton is sketch and the Newton will automatically smooth out your shapes because you know you can't drill can't draw a perfect circle or a perfect square so if we go down here to where I changed the the input method I'm going to go to shapes the cursor goes away I'm going to draw a square to the best of my ability and it automatically smoothes it out I'm going to draw a circle to the best of my ability it automatically smooths it out now what's really neat is that you can move around these shapes and resize them so I'm gonna select it just like I told you how to select before just draw through the item and because this is now a vector watch what I can do yeah this is a really good tool for someone who does a lot of sketching or drawing I can draw a triangle and it will be smoothed out although that didn't work out too well let me try that again perfect and we can tap and drag one of the corners now we can also move some of these so let's say we want to move the circle and the triangle we move the selection line through both items and we can slide them around on the screen so the net effect of this is that you can mix text and shapes and drawing so that let me show you something that I I made earlier and I'll take you through the screen in a minute where is floor plan floor plan here it is floor plan you get something like this which is a really nice looking mix of text and shapes and everything like this and from here you can fax a note you can fax a note you can email a note you can be Manute and the way you do that is that in the upper right corner there's a picture of a mailbox now I can't do any of this because I don't have the right equipment nor do I have why isn't it responding here we go nor do I have another Newton - beam - but here we have print note fax note and beam and I'm assuming if you have the right capabilities and the right card we're hooked up to this you could also email the note now I showed you the screen down here when I press the dot it shows me all of the different entries in notes that I have right now and if you're in calendar pressing on that dot will show you all the different calendar entries you have and you can flip through them with the up and down buttons or I can just make a new note by new and going to note we can also choose a few other things from this note application we can do a new checklist so we can say you know milk and we're in the wrong mode let me change it once we're in shapes though so I need to change the text so let me do milk and I'm gonna go down an item cheese say we're going shopping and then when you're done with them you can check them off and that sort of thing a really intuitive way to to make a list I think and let's go to the next one which is outline this is really great for a student so biography got the word right so let's go down a indent and we'll type another item in the list and from here we can go down another item and so on and so forth now something that's really neat is the Newton's integration with the notepad with the other PIM programs such as names and dates which we'll cover in a minute that lets you do calendar and contacts if I write lunch with Brandon watch what happens and I am in the right mode so I'm just going to do lunch that's probably not going to come out very well so I'm gonna scribble that out although I could have corrected it lunch with Brandon and now I'm gonna highlight this and I'm gonna go to the assist button on the bottom the assist button responds to certain commands so it knows that I want to schedule a meeting so it brings up a new meeting card and all I have to do is input the date and the time and it's already got the title lunch with Brandon pretty smart right Windows Mobile can't do that let me scribble that out you can do other things such as call people so I'm gonna do call Bob if there's a bob in my contact list so I'm gonna do call Bob and of course it's showing though showing up where the cursor is I'm going to highlight it do the assist button and look look what comes up Bob Anderson his contact card if I press the call button it will call Bob and no this doesn't have a phone but the idea is that you hold up your phone to the speaker and you hear it dialing it will dial Bob Anderson for you and I'm going to close this and note where the close button is down here in the bottom right corner there's other things that you can do with this assist function so we can set a reminder to do something so remind me - I don't know I'm just gonna type remind me and you'll see what it does remind me and I'm gonna highlight it go to assist and what you get is a to do tasks automatically comes up pretty smart okay so let's take a look at the other PIM applications down here we have names which is basically like a Rolodex or contacts list and we can sort the names by category and here are all the contexts that I have now let's say I want to add a new one I love the way that you add a contact in the the Newton operating system it's just so fast and so intuitive so I'm going to write new person and let's see I let's say I want to write a new contact for Bill Gates I know his phone number I know his name look how fast I can enter this ready done talk about a fast way to interact with the device it's completely natural it misspelled the name gates so I'm gonna change that to a G well and that should be a T there we go and it's added perfect now let's go into the dates application which is the calendar application we can change view by clicking the show button here we can go to a week view we can go to a month view and just like in any PIM application if you click on a day it will take you to that day we can click our cursor at one o'clock and we can start typing anywhere on the screen just like we could do in the notes application so let's say I'm gonna have lunch with Bob so I'm gonna do lunch with Bob and we're done there it is lunch with Bob has been made and as I mentioned this dot in the calendar application will draw a list of all of your different appointments just like in notes application it will bring up a list of all of your different notes so it's a really great way to kind of see them one glance the appointments that you have over the next period of time now I want to go into the extras button because there are a few other programs that is on the Newton message pad 2100 here we have something called styles which will allow you to change the kind of style that shows up on the screen when it converts your ten writing to text or when you type with the on-screen keyboard so we can do bold italics underline we can change the size right now it's on 18-point we can even change the font there are only three fonts but you know that's that's appreciated we've casual fancy and simple and we can also change the thickness of the pen so right now it's on a two so you can see it's kind of kind of thin if we change it to a four much thicker some people may prefer to prefer that so that they can see it on the screen going back into extras we have a simple clock and we have also a preferences screen which doesn't let you do do that many things I mean you can change how loud the volume is you can configure a modem specify how it's synchronized with your computer and that sort of thing even adjust the handwriting recognition little bit you can specify how closely-spaced your writing is and you can also check off if you want it to do cursive or if you want it to do print and I have it set to print because I can't do cursive very well okay back in extras we have a formulas program which will allow us to do things like loan amortization net present value currency exchange deed calculator so useful things that may be of use on the go to the mobile professional we have a simple calculator we can change the time zone that we're in and we can see a list of all the calls we've made and you know recently we've caught we've called Bob Anderson and why would you want to see this on a device that doesn't even have a phone well you could want to write a note on the call so that the next time you call Bob you could say Oh last time we talked about the westcoast account or something like that and over here on the bottom we have some system statistics so we have the amount of battery that's currently remaining and I have to say the battery on the Newton lasts a very long time and I'm sure the batteries in here are very old but this device doesn't seem very power-hungry contrasts we can change the contrast of the screen and it makes this ticking sound and over here we have volume because as you have heard throughout the demonstration it makes a lot of sounds now there's actually screen rotation built into this which is great if we click on rotate we can rotate it in any direction so I'm going to go to the left and it takes a minute to redraw and what's interesting is that it makes really good use of the screen real estate so it places the icons on the left side and if you want you can actually have the buttons go on the right like so in conclusion the Apple Newton message pad is a fantastic note-taking device every time I go to a convention or conference I bring along one of these notepads and you know what it's a really inconvenient and not organized way to keep track of my notes because I can't search for text I can't organize them by category it's just a big mess of yellow pages and the Newton really would be a good remedy to that back in 1997 when this came out I don't think the world was ready for an advanced note-taking device especially when it was trying to be a PDA communication device note-taking device all in one the world was just not ready for it I guess the modern-day equivalent of this would be a tablet PC because it's a larger form factor tablet PC doesn't fit in your pocket and it does a lot with natural text input so that's it for the video series on the Apple Newton message pad 2100 I hope you enjoyed this tech step back in time at the device that really helped pave the way for mobile technology and mobile devices that we have today that's it for now