In no particular order:

• No copy/paste. If I want to, say, text message a link to someone, I have to manually type it in. This is a huge pain in the ass. I did discover, however, that you can email a link to someone rather easily.
• Can’t save pictures from emails. If someone sends me an email with a picture in it, all i can do is view it. It would be nice if there were some mechanism to save the picture to the Photos app.
• No custom ringtones. But there is a hack. Haven’t had the guts to try it yet, tho.
• No support for multiple calendars. It just lumps everything together. And you can only sync back to one calendar on your Mac. This is something I hope to see fixed with Leopard and its integrated calendar server.
• Need more BlueTooth services. Like file transfer or tethering. That’s the one feature I really liked about my RAZR. Probably not ever going to happen, but a guy can dream.
• iPhoto. Why must iPhoto open every single time I plug the thing in? I know, it’s so I can sync my photos, but can’t they just add something in iTunes to do it automagically? Update: Fixed
• No password manager. It gets really annoying having to type in my username and password whenever I go to a site that requires it.
• Opening links in a new window. Sometimes I like to follow a link, but at the same time keep the page I’m on available without having to hit the back button 12 times. Update: Fixed
• I need a real PDF reader!!! Seriously. I have two options for reading PDFs on the iPhone: by clicking on a link in the browser or attaching them to an email. Neither of these options is really working for me. If I use the browser, whenever Safari decides it doesn’t want to remember the page I’m viewing, I have to hope I remember what page of the PDF I’m on so I can scroll on back to it. The mail attachment option is worse. If I’m in the middle of reading a PDF that I’ve emailed myself and decide I want to check for any new mail, I have to remember what page I’m on in the PDF, go back to my inbox, check my mail, re-open the email with the PDF, and again hope I remember what page I was on because I’m going to have to scroll all the way back to it. Plus, I can’t view it in landscape mode this way. I’m not asking for Acrobat Pro here, or even Preview. Just a standalone app that will remember what page I’m on if I decide to go do something else on the phone.
• No SDK. ‘Nuff said

Those are my big gripes thus far. There are a couple of small things too, but I’m not really all that concerned about them.

With the advent of the iPhone, the NewtonTalk mailing list has been abuzz with conversation about this new Apple mobile device. Comparisons with the Newton were to be expected [by me at least]. Folks, for the most part, seem to have lined up into two camps: those who think the iPhone is a great device and a reasonable successor to the Newton and those who despise the thing because it is not a Newton. I generally find myself in the former group. Despite my love for my little green friend and everything the Newton community has done, my Newton is beginning to show its age. Getting on the internet is flaky at best. I have error messages popping up at random times. I haven’t even bothered trying to sync it with my MacBook Pro because it’s such a hassle. And I think my battery is shot.

Actually, let’s talk about batteries for a bit. This seems to have spurred the greatest bit of “controversy” on the NewtonTalk list. Yes, if my Newton’s battery has kicked the bucket I can always go on the internet and buy a new one or load up my battery tray with some AAs. J&K Sales sells new Newton batteries for $45. I think that’s quite reasonable and if I should, indeed, have to replace the battery I will buy one from them. Yes, I could never do that with my iPhone. If the battery ever goes on it, I will have to send it to Apple and pay the $30 to rent a replacement until it’s fixed. But here’s the thing to keep in mind: I will be getting AppleCare on my iPhone. That will cover any battery replacement costs for the next three years, excepting the aforementioned rental. And by the time that period is up, I will certainly be ready to buy the latest and greatest iteration of the device. So really, I don’t see what the problem is here….

I suppose that in a very DIY community, such as the Newton has, the closed nature of the iPhone was bound to draw some ire. Despite its lack of handwriting recognition and the fact that you can’t develop real applications for it, the iPhone is an incredible mobile device and I think it’s worth every penny I paid for it. Is it perfect? Of course not and I’ll have more to say about that in a later post. But it’s the best we’re going to get from Apple in the way of non-laptop mobile devices.

There are two things that Steve Jobs will never, ever do. He will never license OS X to run on generic PCs and he will never bring back the Newton, or even something very closely resembling the Newton. I’m sorry my fellow Newtoners, but that’s the reality of the situation.

Update: I thought of something else the Newton can not, and will not ever, be able to do. It can’t do PDFs. At all. There are “workarounds” but they never seem to work for me. It’s a real shame too, because the Newton’s form factor would make it the perfect PDF reader.

The answer, it turns out, was Bluetooth. And thanks to Adriano Angelillis and Eckhart Köppen it works perfectly. Adriano has been graciously providing the Newton community an easy way to purchase compatible PCMCIA Bluetooth cards and Eckhart is the mastermind who implemented the Bluetooth protocol stack on the Newton. It’s fast and, so far, very reliable. It amazes me how the Newton community has managed to do such incredible things with such dated hardware. So until next time, Keep It Green.

I downloaded Boot Camp and sacrificed 20GB of my hard drive to Windows XP. Besides the general repugnance I feel whenever installing Windows anywhere, the process was straightforward. Everything seems to work the way it should. I’m going to eventually install Guild Wars on there and see how that works out. More pictures here.

I’m still getting used to the size of this thing; it’s just odd having so much screen. Speaking of the display, it’s significantly brighter than my 12″ PowerBook’s LCD. I also keep making typos as I’m not used to the keyboard yet [the backlit keyboard, yay]. I expected the MBP to be a bit heavier than it actually is. So far, I’ve installed the majority of the software I use on a regular basis. There are still a few menu bar items that I can’t remember the names of, so I haven’t gotten around to getting those. I tried out Front Row and Photo Booth this morning and they’re quite neat applications. The speed boost of the 2.16GHz Core Duo is, of course, quite welcome. Spotlight especially runs amazingly fast. It imported everything from my 100GB external firewire drive and I didn’t even notice.

So what’s going to happen to my 12″ PowerBook? I couldn’t bare to part with the thing. Despite it’s pokey-ness, it’s still my favourite computer ever. I’m giving it to Steph so that I can visit it whenever I want. I didn’t delete any of my stuff from it, because I figure I’m going to forget to move something over to the MBP and I’d like to have a “backup”. I just created her own user account with some basic apps in the Dock. She’s not a Mac user [yet], so it’ll take some getting used to for her, but hopefully she’ll be the next person I get to switch.

When we finally made it, I looked around for something to buy. I decided on an AirPort Express. Expect Apple to release one that does video in the next month or so now that I finally have one. I mostly bought it for the print server anyway; I’ve had issues using printer sharing on OS X. I also got two free t-shirts, as my brother didn’t want his. Many pictures were taken. See them here. It was good times.

That is all.

• iLife ‘06 – I’ll definitely be making a trip to the Menlo Park Apple Store to pick this up. The new iPhoto features look pretty snazzy, especially if I want to get Steph that “Sexy Poses of A.J.” calendar. iWeb is intriguing; I’m curious to see how well it does things and how customisable it is. The Podcast Studio feature of GarageBand looks impressive and would be useful if I ever get that podcast started. And watching Steve demo iMovie made me want to go out and buy a digital camcorder so I could actually have some reason to use it. But that could have just been the Reality Distortion Field.
• iWork ‘06 – BFD.
• Intel iMac – The first of the anticipated Intel Macs. I’ve been pushing Steph to get an iMac for a while, now I have a reason to push her harder. But apparently “You’ll have a better/faster machine than me” isn’t sufficient motivation for her.
• MacBook Pro – Worst Name EVER. The benchmarks were a little misleading since they’re comparing a single processor machine to what is, in effect, a dual processor machine. It only comes in the 15″ at this point, which is too big for me; I like something smaller and more portable. They also changed the ports that it comes with, but I only use USB and FireWire 400 anyway, so it wouldn’t really affect me all that much. I do like the new magnetic power adapter.

In other news, I ran all the updates available in Software Update, including the much put off Bluetooth firmware upgrade. I don’t think I did anything wrong, but it seems to have broken my Bluetooth. I haven’t checked Apple’s site yet to see if anyone else had the problem, but I will. I also had a bit of an issue with the local copy of WordPress I keep on my PowerBook for testing purposes. After blindly flailing at MySQL for about three hours, including a re-install, I did what I should have done first and checked the WordPress support forums. There in all it’s digital glory was the solution.