The Apple Newton refuses to die. The Worldwide Newton Conference 2004 has wrapped up photos (http://www.tow.com/photogallery/2004/20040908_wwnc/) and, thanks to Paul Guyot, there is real hope for an emulator (http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/program/paulguyot/). His talk (http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/program/paulguyot/slide s-paulguyot.pdf), titled "Newton never dies, It only gets new hardware," describes and shows the Einstein Emulator, that will eventually allow the Newton OS to be built and run on top of Unix.

Forget Palm for a moment. Forget PocketPC. Will your next Linux PDA boot Newton OS next year?

Source: Slashdot

So is the Newton OS not licensed or patented by Apple anymore? And if not, who owns it now?

Apple still owns all rights to Newton OS and the MessagePad. Newton OS 2.x's handwriting recognition called "Rosetta" is the foundation of Inkwell in OS X.

Larry Yaeger, the father of the Rosetta recognizer, was a presenter (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3577746.stm) at the WWNC.

As a current Newton MessagePad 2100 and Tapwave Zodiac 2 (my primary PDA) owner, I was pleasantly surprised to see the Zodiac featured in one of Roman Pixell's slides (http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/program/romanpixell/) at the WWNC. With Einstein, hopefully one day soon my avatar will become a reality ;), and several people on the NewtonTalk list have mentioned the Zodiac as a possible candidate for Einstein due to the Zodiac's striking similarities in form, dual expansion slots, and comfort in landscape or portrait orientation.

I was always interested in the Newton since they were announced back in 1993, but they were too expensive to fit within my college grad budget at the time. As a result, I was immediately drawn to the USR Palm Pilot when it was released in 1996, it was my first PDA.

After buying my Sony Clie NX70V, I still felt something was missing and read about the dedicated Newton community that still exists, and I started lurking the NewtonTalk (http://www.newtontalk.net) mailing list. I purchased a mint MP2100 and immediately found the Newton OS had what I felt was missing from current PDAs. The HWR and Intelligent Assistance Architecture (http://www.msu.edu/~luckie/gallery/mp2000.htm) are still unmatched today.

So is the Newton OS not licensed or patented by Apple anymore? And if not, who owns it now?As with the earlier Macintosh emulators, you must have a Newton ROM to run the emulator, so Apple has gotten its due, and the universe of Newton users can't grow larger than the total sales of the devices.