I don't buy it. Steve has said "no PDA" in the past and
nothing that has come since tends to contradict or contraindicate that. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a "Newton II" that resurrects some of the great features of the Newton. But I really don't think that the PDA market is somewhere Apple wants to be.
It's more likely that some of the Newton technology will show up in other devices. The storage method (Soups) was a very interesting one, and allowed for some surprisingly useful interactions with the data from many applications. In a desktop environment, it would be the next step to filesystem-based metadata, a la BeOS. The HWR engine (Rosetta?) was, at the end, very very good and it would be nice to see it used somewhere else also.
In the end, though, these tech's will not see expression in a PDA from Apple again any time soon. I'd be willing to bet that we'll not see an Apple-branded PDA for at least the next 18-24 months. Again, I'd be happy if I was wrong, but I don't think I am.
Now, it
would be interesting to see the iPod in titanium, which may be the distinguishing feature of the higher-capacity iPods, but the screen would not need to be bigger, nor would the software be all that different from the existing iPod. Higher capacity iPods are just a matter of time (I'm guessing MWNY), and it will be fun to see what they do with it.
