I’m a long time Newton user. I still have my 2100 and carry it around everywhere I go. It keeps track of my appointments, addresses, meeting notes and lately I’ve been using it to read ebooks. It’s a remarkable little device and is still going strong despite the daily abuse.

Since I first purchased my Newton there have been some radical changes in the Apple universe. The Newton was discontinued and Apple has released OS X as the successor to OS 9. There are a lot of long time Mac users who don’t like it, but I think it’s been a great improvement. More importantly it give Apple a highly flexible platform, one that could lead to the release of a Mac Tablet.

When Apple decided to move to OS X, they chose to use open source software code for the guts of their product. While this may not seem all that significant to most, there are continual efforts by enthusiasts to make things run efficiently with minimal system resources. How is this important? It gives Apple common code base that can be used on all of it’s systems, large or small.

I’ve seen the Tablet PC’s that Microsoft is is pushing and I’m not impressed. They are simply too large. Most of them are just laptop computers that have had their keyboards removed. A few are convertables that still have keyboards. That’s fine but it’s not a revolutionary device, such pen based computers have been in existence for years. I think they’re too big to be useful in the same way a pad of paper is useful. I’m talking about a device that is thin, lightweight and can keep up with an eight hour work day without being tethered to a power supply.

I think Apple is uniquely poised to take advantabe of this market. They’ve learned how to make things small with their line of iBooks and PowerBooks. There needs to be some advances in power technology, but even today the iBook I regularly use will function for more than 4 hours on a single charge.

One of the Newton technologies that lives on in OS X is the handwriting recognition. Apple refers to it as Inkwell, and you’ll only see it if you happen to have a graphics tablet connected to your Mac, but it’s built into the OS already. I have not had any direct experience with it, but if it truly is based on the handwriting recognition in the Newton it should be very good indeed. At least no worse than my trusty 2100.

The other bit of of Apple technology that could be extremely useful is their iSync software. While I want a small Tablet that is capable of working on it’s own. I want it to stay in sync with my desktop Mac. iSync would effectively keep the Tablet in tune with the desktop so that all of my information is instantly accceessable no matter which device I was using.

So what would such a device look like? Well I’ve taken the liberty of doing a little mock up of what I would like to see. To create this picture I snapped a photo of my iBook and applied a little editing with the GIMP. You can see it’s about half the size of the iBook, which would give it a screen approximately 8 inches in size. It would have the same ports as the iBook, so it could easily support external devices as needed. One thing it would not have is a CD Rom or DVD drive. I don’t need or want that functionality and would gladly trade the space for a smaller size and increased battery life. Such a device would have to have a minimum eight hours of battery life to make me retire my Newton. Naturally it would have Airport for wireless network connections.

Is such a device a pipe dream? Maybe. There has been a lot of speculation over the last 6 months that Apple really does have a device like this in the works. This speculation has not been confined to the rumor sites either. Some better known news outlets have speculated on this device. Jobs himself has said that they will not be entering the PDA segment again, and I think that would be a wise choice. However a device like what I’m wishing for would not really be a PDA, it woiuld be a full fledged Mac in a reduced form factor. The expansion ports would allow it to connect to full size keyboards and monitors as needed, but the compact size would make it ideal for traveling lightly.

So what are the odds of this ever seeing the light of day outside of Apple? I don’t know, but from the amount of speculation on the web, I’m hopefull that Apple is listening. Since they haven’t said anything other than the fact that they are keeping an eye on the Tablet market, I’ve had to resort to asking the Magic 8 Ball what it thinks will happen: Will Apple produce a Tablet Mac? “Cannot predict now.”