You're not going to like my answer, which is likely to start the
religious wars all over again. :-)
I'm back to the Newton, for several reasons. Note that size/weight is
not that big a deal for me; I don't carry a PDA in a pocket. The thing
gets stuffed into a carrying bag of some sort when I teach, or sits
around at home, or gets thrown into a purse-like thing for other
occasions. So the extra weight of the Newton is merely an annoyance.
Note also that I've been using an OmniBook 300 for spreadsheet
tasks and a Psion for names and addresses, and I've kept appointments
largely on yellow stickies. I just have not been comfortable with
all the features on any one machine.
There is terrific software for the Newton; it's certainly become a
true platform rather than a mere organizer. I really need a
spreadsheet, a list manager of some sort, and a gradebook program.
All are available *now* commercially, though the gradebook looks
awfully cutesy and may force me to use the spreadsheet. There do
seem to be some very interesting new types of software, particularly
various stationeries. And there is PPP connectivity, too. The
Newton HWR is now good enough to compete with Grafitti, though after
learning Grafitti for the Pilot and OmniGo, I bought Grafitti for
the Newton (I find it the fastest, most accurate entry system of
all the pen options). Backlighting is wonderful.
Other thoughts? The third rev of the Pilot, if the software development
keeps up, will be awesome. I predict a sturdier form factor and back-
lighting. It'll be very nice, say a year to a year and a half from
now. . . . by which time both Apple and Psion should have products
based on the StrongARM processor, and the battle will be joined anew.
I do not like the OmniGo keyboard. I *love* the Jotter.
The Pilot is very fast.
I guess I keep coming back to the maturity of the Newton in comparison.
Many of its best features were copied by USR and HP, and the third-
party market has had time to grow. The downside is that until Apple
releases some connectivity packages, synching is awfully difficult if
not impossible.
The Pilot is an organizer that's a simularcrum (wow! when was the last
time you used *that* in a sentence?) of a PC-based PIM. You can argue
which is the primary tool, the PC software or the portable Pilot that
extends it. The Newton is a computing platform based around HWR; it's
becoming a separate universe. The OmniGo is somewhere in the middle.
Does this make any sense?
They are *all* good units. But the choice is very personal, something
that gets stated over and over in these discussions. Each PDA has a
different feature set and a different feel. I can't stand these "my
PDA is better than yours" diatribes; they're merely different.
-Ezra
(former Byte and MacWeek columnist, if you couldn't tell)