Archive for September 2nd, 2009

iPhone’s Grandma Goes Under the Knife

September 2nd, 2009

If the iPhone 3GS had parents, its father would be the iPhone 3G, and its mother would be the 1st Gen iPhone. If it had a Grandma, that would unequivocally have to be the Apple Newton. We’ve done teardown videos on all of the iPhone models, and so it seemed only logical (and respectful) to give the Newton the same honor.

What’s the Newton you ask? The Newton was one of the first PDAs available circa 1998. It was revolutionary and ahead of its time. The system had handwriting recognition, applications, data storage, etc.. It was a Palm before the Palm was cool.

The main goal of the Newton was to revolutionize personal computing. At the time, the project was considered a failure in many ways as it did not live up to its goals. However, looking back, the Newton was the springboard for a lot of the current technologies we enjoy today. For example, the software that goes into iPods was developed by some of the Newton creators. Also, the handwriting recognition engine from the Newton crept into the Jaguar operating system in the form of Inkwell and is rumored to be the base of the handwriting recognition for the rumored Mac Tablet.

So here’s to the iPhone’s Grandma and her progeny: