While it's a good enough OS (lots of people like it for being small and
fast), it was designed for COMPUTERS not PDAs. There is a difference.
The Newton OS is wierd. It uses a language called Newton Script, which,
among other things, is designed to execute object oriented code from ROM, the
main mission of a PDA. Newton Script is designed from the ground up to be a
PDA, the language, the way it presents data to the user, the fact that the
classes for windows, menus, buttons, etc can be subclassed and used in
applications (meaning that each application doesn't need to contain the stuff
that draws buttons, etc) while still running the non-overridden code in ROM
(which leads to smaller apps), the fact that everything is resident in memory
at once (things don't "load" from disk or "launch", their views just become
visible), the fact that it's a real-time operating system (CS folks will
understand this one), the fact that all data is stored in big databases
accessable to any applications, and many other things make this a new kind of
device, designed for this specific mission from the start.
What does this mean to the user? Apps generally launch fast, maybe two
seconds for an address book with a hundred names. The fact that data is
stored in databases that can be used by any application means that Names, for
example, can be accessed by a third-party Sales Contact Manager and the
built-in Names software at the same time, neither caring about extra
information the other puts in the database (no files, no file formats, just
data soup). This leads to a lot of very easily programmed cross
functionality between apps. A developer, for example, could write an app
that goes into the Names soup and finds entries with the birthday field
filled in and schedules a calendar reminder for that person's birthday - all
without knowing how those programs work. A pager getting a message in can
write it into the Notepad or ToDo list, etc. Text anywhere in the system can
be searched from anywhere else in the system.
It's the idea of "data soup", everything interconnected, that is at the heart
of the Newton. On other platforms, each developer has to reverse engineer
other people's file formats (or get them to cough them up) in order to get
that kind of cross functionality and, as history has shown on the Mac and
Windows systems out there, they rarely go to all that trouble.
That's my spin on it, anyway...Subj: GEOS Part 1