Commentary: Apple’s New PDA!

Apple has finally, finally, finally come out with its long-awaited and much-anticipated PDA!

Surprisingly enough, however, no one seems to have noticed.

Like many of the people who bought into Apple’s first PDA venture, the Newton, I’ve been waiting for years and years for the One Infinite Loop crew to get back into that market again.

Oh my gosh, I remember the early rush of using my Newton on the Montréal Metro (the Subway or Tube for you non-Montréalers/Montréalais(e)), setting appointments and such in morning commuter traffic with everyone carefully watching me out of the corner of their eyes.

If I had chirped, “Beam me up Scotty!” and just disappeared in a quick sparkly cloud, I don’t think I would have gotten a very different reaction then. It was new. It was novel. Everyone had heard about them, but no one had seen one. It was agonizingly cool. I had the future of computing and communications in my hot little hands, and everyone who saw me knew it!

Well, I used that Newton until the very last of its rechargeable battery packs finally died and I had to look for something else.

Nothing else ever quite measured up. I guess your first love is truly your strongest. After about five years on and off using lackluster devices, I just got bored and ditched the whole PDA thing altogether, going back to balancing my life and schedule between my computer and pocketfuls of scrap paper.

It was obviously up to Apple to rescue me and help me get my PDA groove back. Like so many other former Newtonites then, I followed every rumour and insinuation bubbling up in the Applesphere and simply waited.

And now, yes, and now it’s here! Yeah! Hurrah!

Apple has finally come back with a brilliant PDA, pushing the industry’s capability and margins to the utmost, confounding their rivals and critics once again!

Steve Jobs his very self came out and presented this marvel, the new Apple PDA, at MacWorld!

Only, well, he called it something else. He called it an “iPhone.”

This phone-thingy, if that’s what you want to think of it as, has a kick-butt intelligent screen, runs a spare version of Mac OS X itself, has a keypad, tons of storage, and all the PDA basics of contacts and appointments, notes and memos, multimedia, and even extra stuff like email and web access, if you set up (and pay for) the right services of course.

And, all importantly for me, the clincher really, is that the device provides users the ability to read and write documents of almost any size! I wrote a novel on a PDA, and have read maybe a thousand volumes or more over the years on tiny glowing screens. This eBook thing is very very important to me, though it actually wasn’t anything Steve mentioned.

I am, however, pretty darned sure that with a couple seconds of typing, I’ll be able to use that teeny little Safari browser to connect to my Google Docs and Spreadsheets account and, Jackpot! I’m back in business again!

Oh, that phone stuff, well, that’s good too. Icing on the cake really. But, for me, this iPhone thing means, two shakes of a lamb’s tail simple, that sometime around July I’ve got my Apple PDA back and can be cool AND data portable again.

Yeah!