Snippet: Newton, Reconsidered ☇

Time’s Harry McCracken decides to review the Apple Newton MessagePad almost twenty years after its debut, and there’s some good perspective for anyone who thinks the iPhone and iPad were purely gadgets from after the days of iThis and iThat:

Once I’d put four AAA batteries and a watch-battery backup into the MessagePad for the first time, powering it up felt like bringing it out of cryogenic suspension. Newtons, it turns out, begin their lives believing that it’s 5am on January 1, 1993. And the only way to set the year to 2012 is to flip the calendar forward, one month at a time. I tapped the MessagePad’s screen 230 times to set the date, watching the months flutter by like pages falling off a calendar to indicate the passage of time in some old movie.