Is Apple trying to revive the Newton? iPod touch says yes.
September 9, 2007 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Apple, Handy Peripherals, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Unwired Oddities, iPhone
Back in 2001, the “in thing” was having a mobile phone with Bluetooth and a personal digital assistant. The latter allowed you to keep schedule, listen to music and view photos while your phone simply allowed you to send away text messages. You could sync both devices wirelessly, and this was the beginning of how the industry juggled OTA sync tools. My personal favorite config was the Nokia 6310i with the Palm m515 and a Bluetooth SDIO card.
Now, Apple had just announced the iPod touch, a niche market product that heavily capitalizes on the iPhone sans the calling and camera features. You can use it to browse the Internet via WiFi and watch music and videos. With the coming of the iPod touch, is Apple slowly trying to bring back the dawn of device pairs once more? But then, before you even try to answer that, I’d like to dare a suggestion – is Steve Jobs trying to revive the Apple Newton?
The Apple Newton was a PDA device that was too early and advanced for its time. It was so advanced, CNET did a feature on how it fared against a Samsung Q1. UMPC. It was scrapped and replaced for more consumer friendly products like the desktop Macs, Powerbooks and iPods.
In 1997, Palm had a 66 percent market share, Windows CE had 20 percent, and Newton just 6 percent, according to market research firm Dataquest. At the height of its popularity, only an estimated 200,000 Newtons were in use.
Apple finally killed the Newton in February 1998 after Steve Jobs returned to the company, even though fans demonstrated in the parking lot of Apple’s Cupertino campus. Apple officials gave them coffee and cookies but refused to resurrect the device. [source]
Here is why I think the Newton revival can be a possibility. Apple’s core competence doesn’t have anything to do with mobile phones and the telco industry. Amidst the hulabahoo of the exclusivities with AT&T and the unlocking phenomena of the iPhone, Apple stands to win more market share by releasing an iPhone that does more without the calling feature. Leave the phone manufacturing to the Nokias and the BlackBerry guys and concentrate on coming up with “Apple-centric products” (no more dealing with third parties). This seems to be the direction of two other companies: the Palm Foleo (the next version) as well as the ASUS eee.
Flames, anyone? 
I think iPhone is a new Newton. It has a Palm + Cellphone function.
The problem with Newton is that they didn`t have the market and also it was not as sellable as they tought.
Now, palm devices are really dissapearing and palm+cellphone devices are selling high. Look at Treo, last palm device, that survived thanks to the phone habilities.
With new MID computers and cellphone getting more functionality, Apple had to invest in one or another. MID`s can still be a near future device, but the cellphone market is real and is growing. And this market was asking for a better computer-cellphone device. The iPhone fills that gap easily, what no other modern phone was doing yet (yes, they had MP3, vídeo, but the screen and keyboard were awful, plus they had almost no memory for good vídeo).