Bring your Newton into the next century
with Smart Dog BackTalk
Unfortunately, higher-level IrDA standards, intended to give infrared appliances a common protocol for information exchange, did not exist at the time the Newton was produced, and so were not included in the Newton ROMs.
Now the IrDA standards are proliferating, and have been implemented on the Palm III, V, and VII machines, various WinCE machines, and even specialized appliances like the HP CapShare handheld scanner - and more are coming every day.
It is tragically ironic that the Newton, the earliest consumer PDA platform to support the low-level IrDA standards, is crippled by nothing more than its own early introduction, and cannot communicate with modern infrared devices.
And tomorrow's, as well. A flexible translation architecture makes support of new data formats as easy as creating a simple translation library and dropping it into the Newton's system as an independent component; any Newton developer will be able to write new translators to further extend the Newton's communication capabilities.
Extended Systems/Counterpoint has licensed its IrOBEX stack for a number of other platforms, including the Palm series of digital organizers and the HP CapShare 920 hand-held scanner. With Extended Systems/Counterpoint and Smart Dog Software, your communications are guaranteed to be industry-standard.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
This page was last modified on April 24, 2001.