Word: newtons
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Public attention has increasingly focused on Charles River pollution in the last few years, especially since this summer's sewage leaks in Cambridge and Newton...
Well, not so fast. For most of this decade the shrinking game has petered out when it hit our palms. Trying to build a handtop computer like the Apple Newton or Sony's Magic Link was a sure route to digital Edseldom. It was just too hard to fit anything useful into a space the size of a deck of cards...
Pilot users can jot notes and addresses into the machine with a tiny penlike stylus that traces letters onto the touch-sensitive screen, like an Etch-A-Sketch. To help Pilot turn those squiggles into English (the Achilles' heel of the Newton, which was likely to translate GET LUNCH into EAT COUCH), users must write in Graffiti, a simplified written language that replaces each letter with a geometric pattern; an A looks like an upside down V, for instance. It took us 10 minutes to learn, and after a week we were up to about 80% of our normal writing...
...Pilot is almost all screen; input is done with a stylus on its touch-sensitive screen. Unlike the painful full-text recognition of the Newton, the Pilot uses the Grafitti alphabet, which has you enter data letter by letter using special keystrokes. It takes a few hours to learn how to make each letter of the alphabet, but you can easily be writing at 20 words per minute within an afternoon. The Pilot literally took the market by storm as a little guy: it's about the size of an index card, weighs only six ounces and gets several weeks...
Unlike its predecessors, the Pilot costs under $300, making it much more affordable for the average consumer. The price is kept low by emphasizing basic functionality. While expensive PDAs like the Newton fared poorly, consumers gobbled up pocket organizers like Sharp's Wizard and Casio's B.O.S.S. because they did the basics right: they kept your schedule and phone numbers and made both accessible at the touch of a button...