Apr 27 2009
Newton Lives Part 2– WiFi, Bluetooth and More
In part one we connected to our Newtons to OS X. Now we’ll grab drivers and hardware to bring your vintage hardware into the 21st century.
Wifi
Wireless Internet has become the ubiquitous communication standard. Of course, it wasn’t so when Apple had the Newton family on the drawing board.
Fortunately there are drivers out there for common PCMCIA Wifi cards. A second set of packages make even more compatible. Unfortunately WEP and WPA aren’t supported. Grab a good mail client and browser too.
Bluetooth
Another set of drivers bring Bluetooth into the picture. Bluetooth on your Newton gets you sync and more. I should mention that you can also sync via Wifi. Check out the site for a list of compatible hardware.
Mass Storage
Out of the box, Newtons support expensive and hard to find linear flash memory cards. Thanks to this driver you can mount and format Flash memory cards like CF or SD via PCMCIA adapter.
The drivers are shareware, but you can format and use one 2 MB partition for free. Because Newton reads only its own format, you won’t be able to use the cards to transfer files, but you can use them for supplemental space for applications and data.
It goes without saying that the Newton is alive and well. And, thanks to the power of the community, we can enjoy more than just killer handwriting recognition and amazing battery life – we can stay in the game with the latest in communication and storage.
Note: Both Part I and II were of this series were written on an eMate 300 running Newton OS 2.1.