This little Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

Those who are bone-weary of the relentless hype that our industries subject us to on a daily basis find it difficult to accept when something, anything, actually pierces our hides and evokes a positive response.

That explains our somewhat grudging praise of Apple Computer’s new Newton technology for Personal Digital Assistants, which really is quite remarkable.

It is not the beginning of a revolution, as Apple chairman John Sculley claims. What happened in the USSR is a revolution. What’s happening in Thailand is a revolution. Newton technology is software for little hand-held computers, so let’s keep things in perspective.

THE NEXT WAVE

However, Newtonian devices are obviously the “next wave” of computing, and none of the big players are wasting any time getting involved. On the very same day as Apple’s unveiling of Newton at a nightclub near the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Tandy Corp. announced that it was working with Casio Computer, the Japanese consumer electronics firm, to create a family of “Personal Information Processors” or pips (see sidebar).

Although Tandy is adamant that its pips are significantly different in intent from Apple’s PDAs, it doesn’t look like it from where we sit. Apple’s and Tandy’s “personal product” lines are likely to have the same distinguishing characteristics that their computers do now.

Apple’s PDAs, which it is codeveloping with Sharp Electronics, are likely to be designed to the teeth, full of features and priced for the well-heeled yuppie. Tandy’s will appeal to more middle-of-the-road users, willing to swap some style for brute utility — the same kinds of users who buy IBM PC clones. And Microsoft, which has declared its intention to enter this market but has not yet made an announcement, is likely to be somewhere in-between.

THE BIGGEST DEAL SINCE MACINTOSH

Newton technology is certainly the most significant piece of system software out of Apple Computer since the Macintosh in 1984. For those who were under a rock and might have missed the media blitz, here’s a quick rundown of what Apple announced at CES.

Straddling the fence. Newton is the name of a technology set that Apple will build into an entire product line of what it calls “Personal Digital Assistants,” or PDAs. Made possible by rapid advancements in computer power and miniaturization, the PDA straddles the fence that has traditionally separated consumer electronics devices from computers.

The first Newton Apple showed in Chicago, driven by a powerful RISC processor chip, fits neatly in the palm of the hand and is operated using an unattached stylus on a flat-panel display. The best description so far goes to MacWeek, which called the Newton device “a cross between a communicator from the original ‘Star Trek’ television series and a black Porsche 928″ (see photo).

Point-and-squirt. The word “communicator” isn’t used lightly. Newton was designed to allow absolutely simple connectivity between Newton owners, as Apple says, “in meetings, on the street corner, or during lunch.” One favorite feature is the capability for two Newton users to “point-and-squirt” their business cards at each other on the street using the device’s built-in wireless communications capabilities.

A combination of what’s being called “Enhanced LocalTalk” and a collaboration architecture called “Instant Network” will facilitate simple connections and re-connections to existing networks in much the same way that a cellular phone operates. Newton devices will, depending on how they’re configured, be able to fax letters, check electronic mail, or link to satellite news services, as well as hook up to standard computer networks.

RECOGNIZING ‘DATA SOUP’

What’s equally remarkable about Newton is the Newton operating system. Four years in development, it’s designed to facilitate what Apple’s Michael Tchao, Newton manager for product marketing, calls “the inverse of print architecture — instead of concentrating on the output [which is what we've been doing with computers for years], you’re concentrating on input.”

Integral is Newton’s “data soup”-style architecture, which provides flexible views into a free-form database. The concept is to take all the little pieces of data we acquire in a day — phone numbers, maps to meetings, messages — and let Newton organize them. It then can make decisions about what to do with that information.

So if you were to jot down a message from your answering machine that said, “Call Dana re: Feather River, weekend of July 4,” Newton is designed to automatically bring up Dana’s phone number from your address book, and simultaneously display the July calendar to see if you’re free on the 4th.

Snap-in recognizers. Probably its most significant feature is what’s called a “recognizer architecture,” part of Newton’s object-based software technology that allows a device to be configured for a wide variety of applications based on what kinds of pen input it needs to recognize.

For example, a single Newton device might use one company’s cursive handwriting recognizer module, another company’s music recognizer, yet another’s graphics recognizer. “The more recognizers you put in, the more things you can recognize simultaneously,” says Tchao. Though not a function that can be configured by users, Newton supports the recognizers in a hierarchy that’s constructed by the application developer.

In other words, in an application that requires writing in text most of the time, but could also draw on the screen, a software developer would likely “turn up” the intensity of the handwriting recognizer.

That way, if when drawing what appeared to be a triangle — which could be either the letter “A” or an actual symbol — the software would be more likely to recognize it as a letter. If a composer were using Newton to write music, the application would “turn up” the music recognizer so something looking like the letter “d” would be more likely recognized as a musical note.

Motorola, Pacific Bell, Random House, SkyTel Corporation and Traveling Software made announcements in conjunction with Apple to support Newton technology. Apple expects that outside vendor products will focus on communications, content and compatibility with existing systems and will not try to cram desktop applications into the Newton form factors and architecture.

The first Newton product from Apple will be available in English-language versions in early 1993. Newton-based products from Sharp Corp. are also expected to be available in the same time frame.

THE APPLE DROPS

Two immediate downsides of Newton, which aren’t likely to change before launch, are its cost and its battery life — which are too much and too little, respectively. For those who get infuriated with PowerBooks because they can’t get any work done on the damned things before the battery runs out, Sculley’s statement that Apple “hopes for” eight hours of battery life for a Newton is chilling news.

If Apple is working with Sharp, why can’t it get its hands on some of the technology that keeps the Sharp Wizard’s battery running forever, relatively speaking? If the idea behind this device is to make it unobtrusive to the user, and make it completely portable, and totally reliable for all that very important personal information that we cannot do without even for a day, the idea that we have to carry a spare battery to use it outside for more than eight hours is not just daunting. It’s absurd. Consumers don’t care how hard it is to power a backlit screen, they simply don’t.

A little matter of cost. Then there’s cost. Apple is saying the first Newton will cost “less than $1,000,” and even if less-than means $700 that’s simply too much for the consumer-type people that Apple’s marketing seems aimed at. After all, these days you can buy a fairly high-powered PC clone for that kind of money. A high-end Sharp Wizard is actually pushing the envelope at more than $300.

At $700, Newton does seem, as Tandy suggests, far more targeted toward existing Macintosh or computer owners than it does at a whole new market segment. There’s nothing wrong with doing that — in fact, it’s probably a fairly savvy business move — but Apple does itself a disservice by leading the industry (especially the cutthroat consumer electronics industry) to believe that ordinary non-computer-using folks are going to pony up the cost of a nice, big color TV set for such a device.

At least at first, until consumers understand why products like Newton are worth paying for, it might be good to aim the technology at the people who are going to buy it, instead of at the people Apple hopes will buy it. Like the original Newton — that’s Sir Isaac — someone may need to get bonked on the head with this apple before they get the message.

Denise Caruso

TANDY BUILDS A PIP

Though Tandy is holding its cards closely to the chest, it has also announced an upcoming line of what it calls Personal Information Processors, or PIPs.

It’s no surprise that Tandy seems to be a bit allergic to adopting the PDA nomenclature that Apple coined for such devices, and that Microsoft has since adopted. It was also quite purposeful that Tandy’s pip announcement was made on the same day as Apple’s.

“Apple does a masterful job of stirring up the market, evangelizing and making sure the world understands their point of view and perspective,” says Howard Elias, Tandy vice president. “We thought it was very important that this emerging technology and market not be solely defined by Apple — especially since some of the things they’re talking about in terms of size, features, price, we believe are all too much, too big and too expensive for the consumer market.”

A COMPUTER PERSPECTIVE

Though Elias says it’s too early to talk about specific kinds of pip functionality — he doesn’t expect to ship devices until 1993 — the largest consumer electronics company in the U.S. immediately began differentiating itself from Newton.

“When we heard that Apple’s battery life was eight hours, we knew that we were going after a different niche,” says Ed Juge, director of marketing for Tandy. “That sounded to us like the perspective of a computer company. We’re going at it from the view of a consumer electronics company — eight hours isn’t going to cut it, and neither is an $800 or $900 price tag.”

Tandy is teaming with Japan-based Casio, which today owns more than 50 percent of the worldwide market in personal organizers, and award-winning system software makers GeoWorks of Berkeley, CA.

Pip applications are under development by Palm Computing’s Jeff Hawkins, former vice president of research at Grid Systems (now owned by Tandy), the pioneer in pen-based computing.

Denise Caruso