[Lazarus18]

The iPac is pretty nice. The display is great, very bright and readable.

The interface sucks of course. I mean, it's Windows, so what do you expect. Mine came with Dashboard on the CD and getting gigabar is easy. With those two installed you can avoid the accursed start menu all together. It never ceases to amaze me how muddled and sloppy a MS OS gets in so short a time. After you've installed just a few programs the start menu gets to be this big mess. Anyway just use dashboard and gigabar, all's well.

The transcriber leaves something to be desired though (which is why I'm looking at the Newton out of curiosity). It's pretty good, but has some real problems with some of the letters I make, no matter how I change the settings. And the fact that it can't learn (to the best of my knowledge) is disturbing.

So far I don't see a huge improvement over the Palm except for the ease of character input (whatever its flaws the transcriber beats up on the alien script that is graffiti).

I'll let you know how it goes if I manage to get a 130 cheaply.