Apple Newton vs Apple iPhone

Let's get this out of the way quickly so people born in the 90s can stop laughing: the Newton's screen is monochrome. It's only capable of displaying 16 shades of green-tinged grey, but the good news is it's got a backlight -- and not even the legendary Game Boy, which launched at around the time the Newton's development began, could claim that.

More important though, is the fact that the Newton's 152mm (6-inch) display has the same 480x320-pixel resolution as the iPhone, which is undeniably amazing for a device of its age. The Atari Lynx, by contrast, had an 89mm (3.5-inch) screen with a resolution of just 160x102 pixels and the Game Boy's 66mm (2.6-inch) screen ran at 160x144. Outside of proper VGA computer displays, nothing could touch it.

iPhone fanboys often try to sell me the fact that the iPhone has a touch-sensitive display that can be rotated 90 degrees. Erm, hello? The Newton was spinning and twisting its screen before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. Admittedly, the Newton lacks the fancy gesture input of the iPhone, but it didn't need that. Instead, it had something far more useful -- unbelievably good handwriting recognition.

Not only could it accurately understand what the hell it was users were scrawling, but it also allowed intuitive editing methods. Made a mistake with your text? No problem -- just scribble it out and poof goes your error. Even drawing shapes is easy -- just trace the scraggly outline of a square, circle or triangle and the Newton will smooth it all out for you, making graphs and drawings of polygonal things a real no-brainer.

The iPhone may not exceed the Newton's screen resolution, but it packs those pixels tighter into an 89mm display, so the thing can actually fit in your pocket. It's hardly fair to ask the Newton to battle the iPhone's full colour, but it's not just that -- the 163 pixel-per-inch resolution also makes for a sharper image, which means the iPhone won't make you go blind from squinting after using it for a few hours.

If usability is the question, the answer is iPhone, iPhone, a hundred times iPhone. This phone blew our minds with a touchable screen that actually responded to our gentlest caress -- resistive touchscreens like the Newton need a cruel jab with a pointy object and are sluggish and unresponsive compared to the whizzy iPhone.

Handwriting recognition sounds cool, but it's the most useless technology ever to grace our gadgets. No touchscreen in the world relies on handwriting recognition, and there's a reason -- it's slow and useless. It's the same reason why we use keyboards on our PCs instead of handwriting and tablets -- it's faster and more accurate.

The iPhone's virtual keyboard was one of its best innovations, and the bar that every other touchscreen had to beat. Its responsiveness and fantastic word correction made it faster to type on than a netbook in a rally car, and we have the video to prove it. That's no Newton in Rory's fear-soaked fists!

The Newton was a real pioneer, excellent for its time. But the iPhone pushed boundaries with its excellent capacitive, full-colour display. Nobody expected it to work properly, based on the clunky, inaccurate alternatives at the time, but work it did. It's gone on to redefine expectations of what is possible with a mobile screen.