Apple is planning to launch the Apple Newton again after the success of its iPhone product. A team within Apple is reportedly working on a newer version of Newton, utilizing the same touch interface of iPhone and Mac OS X Leopard, new operating system.
Apple doesn’t want to rest on its laurels after the success of iPhone; it wants to work on newer models and go after newer markets. They want to
revive their once popular Apple Newton model, the predecessor of Palm and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant). It was successful at the beginning but suddenly Steve Jobs pulled the plug and stopped producing
Apple Newton. But now after seeing the popularity of iPhone, they want to bring them back to go against Windows Mobile and Palm PDAs.
The iPhone itself is a Smartphone, a PDA, but doesn’t have many applications or programs built in. One can only access a few applications for now and to get the other functions, the users have to access the web like Google Calendar.
The new Apple Newton will employ similar touch screen and interface like the iPhone versions, have copy and paste feature and will operate on Mac OS X Leopard operating system. So, it will have a desktop like feel in a handheld. So, synchronization will then become easy between the desktop and Newton similar to Palm handheld synchronization feature.
With the new Apple Newton, Steve Jobs may be trying to target PDA market and business customers, who are now reluctant to buy iPhones for their companies because of its restrictive use with AT&T.
Mashable.com says Steve Jobs may announce the Apple Newton release as early as next January at Macworld.
Palm should seriously worry about this news, already they are stunned what to do after the release of iPhone, now with Apple Newton it will become a major headache. Palm’s handhelds have plenty of functions compared to iPhone's, but they lack a good design and ease of use, the two things they seem to focus last.
