Newton As A Notepad

Introduction

The practicality of computer devices for an application is not usually clear cut. In handheld devices the situation is made more difficult because an individuals personal characteristics, such as physical body size, clothing, habits and capabilities, as well as usage conditions such as lighting and atmospheric conditions must be considered. In general, a company will not hire workers for the capability to work with the devices, as they might specifically hire "word processor operators" but rather buy devices that are best adapted to the worker and the task.

The original Newton was so bad that it really wasn't acceptable for most people for any of its original tasks. General note taking was simply the most obvious failure. With the introduction of deferred recognition (which I believe was the NI 1.2 version) it began to take on practicality. Deferred recognition made the speed and accuracy levels of that version less important. Short notes could be written and left in "digital ink" form. Recognition could be used later if it was deemed worth the effort. By the time the NI 1.3 version came out for the MP-110, the recognition was good enough for me to use occasionally in this fashion. This is emphatically a personal judgement. Some people were able to use 1.2 satisfactorily and others had to wait till the 2.0 system, or even the 2.1 (MP-2000) arrived for adequate speed and accuracy, and still other people, though I expect they are a minority, may not even be satisfied with 2.1 on the MP-2000.

The MP-120 and MP-130 using the NI 2.0 software fall within the grey area where the need for personal long term testing is paramount. Nobody can tell you whether you're going to be able to use it, or whether you'll like using it, and worse, simply doodling around in the store isn't going to help at all. The main problem with the MP-120 and MP-130 is speed. The 20MHz ARM 620 RISC CPU was a major leap forward in its day, and it was years before Windows CE machines came out with power in that order of magnitude, but the difficulty of the task of handling the pen input, even without recognition active, made performance marginal. The less obvious problem of the necessarily delay from lifting the pen to recognizing a gesture command, such as tapping a screen scroll icon, or starting a new page, adds to the problem.

The Test

There are reasons why I stopped using the Newton MP-110 with NI 1.3 software for note taking at press conferences. At press conferences, PR people generally hand out fairly good pre-printed notes. If you take a good set of notes on a computer, you will mainly duplicate what has been given to you. If you are preparing an extensive article that specifically covers the topic of the meeting there may be a point in doing this. You would probably have to type in all that information anyway. But if you are covering the meeting for "background" or looking for a quick "handle" on the topic for a short mention, there's no point in doing this. It's more practical to write marginal notes on the paper provided.

The Expedia presentation was a "background" situation for me. There were specific matters that were of interest, but I would not be writing an article about Expedia. So it was a good time for me to test the MP-120 and see how the improvements affected its performance.

Methodology

The MP-120 was essentially empty. I have used it a bit, so the handwriting recognition is beginning to adapt to me, but as I have reported previously, I have found the handwriting recognition in the 2.0 software so accurate that this is no longer important to me. The only "setting up" I find necessary is to set the recognition delay time a bit shorter than "factory standard" so it can keep up with me. The setting I use is "1 notch" faster. I may change that to "2 notches" faster later, but so far "1 notch" is good enough. When the recognition adapts to my handwriting I might even speed up the recognition "1 notch". I believe the accuracy will probably be sufficient at that level, but for now, that's untested.

In general, the procedure was to work the way I would if I were preparing a full article of about 500 words. Keeping in mind that I had the printed materials given out at the press conference and read them before the presentation. It was not necessary for me to write information that was in the printed materials except to put other material in some context.

During the presentation I took notes in the Notepad in "Outline" form with recognition off, but "ink" displayed at 75%. That is to say, after a word is written it is shrunk down to 75% of its original size. This is a bit distracting, and slows down note taking, but it is a good compromise because I am sure that what I write as a "word" is being stored as a "word" rather than having words broken up or run together due to my handwriting anomalies. Occasionally I forced a word to be recognized because I anticipated a problem, and I corrected the spelling where necessary.

After the meeting I returned home. I completed the recognition and edited and rearranged the notes a bit to make them clearer to me. Keep in mind that they may not be clear to you because you were not at the meeting, but the information I wrote was satisfactory to me. Also, BEWARE that some of the "facts" I wrote below may be wrong. That is a problem with press conference notes. If I were preparing an article about Expedia, I'd double check everything to be certain the article was correct. The meeting was about an hour and consisted mainly of a demonstration. But my notes are not about the demonstration.

Near the end of the note I was warned that the space for the note was becoming filled and I started a new note. The Newton scroll jumps the screen about 90% of the screen height which does not leave me enough to retain a context. When I re-edited later, I created more notes, each a bit over 3/4's of a screen in height which made the scrolling more practical.

I later beamed the notes to my old MP-110 because my connection software for the MP-110 allows exporting the notes to my Windows computer. The notes below are formatted to simulate the formatting exported from the MP-110, not the display of the MP-120.