“In product lore, high profile gadgets that get killed are often more interesting than the ones that succeed. The Kin, the HP TouchPad, and the Edsel are all case studies in failure–albeit for different reasons,” Mat Honan reports for Wired.”Yet in the history of those killings, nothing compared to the Apple Newton MessagePad/”
“The Newton wasn’t just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth by one of technology’s great men,” Honan reports. “And yet it was a remarkable device, one whose influence is still with us today. The Ur tablet. The first computer designed to free us utterly from the desktop.”
Honan reports, ” The real impact of the Newton was the thinking that took the computer out of the office. Today, the PDA is with us all the time… It’s our smartphone, and the whole concept of the smartphone was that it would bundle the PDA, the camera, the MP3 player, and the cell phone. And then there’s Siri… The idea of an intelligent assistant that can recognize natural language and act on its intent is powerful once again, but this was something Newton pioneered–one of its great strengths was its ability to take a sentence like ‘I have a lunch meeting with John tomorrow at noon’ and translate that into an actual calendar item. The Newton project was a failure, sure. But its impact lives on, in our day-to-day lives”
Read more in the full article here.