If a had to pick my favourite gadget of all time it would have to be the Apple Newton Messagepad.  For those of you that don’t know what a Newton Messagepad is it was at the time a state of the art PDA far ahead of anything else on the market.

My first Messagepad was the MP100 which I bought way back in 1994. I used this continuously until my next purchase which was a vastly improved MP130 which came with an all important backlight so I could now use it happily in the dark.

In 1996 they then brought out the MP2000 which I immediately purchased. This again was a vast improvement over the previous the model with a speed increase from 20MHz to a whopping 162MHz. Everything on it just worked so much better and it was fast. To this day I have never come across a PDA with handwriting technology that worked as well as this did. Bearing in mind it was launched 10 years ago you can see how way ahead of its time it really was.

Sadly Apple canned Newton in 1998.

I used my MP2000 which I later sent off to Apple to be upgraded to a MP2100 right up until the day it finally died only a couple of years ago. I’ve since bought a second-hand MP2100 off Ebay for nostalgias sake but confess since I lost all the info on the one that died I have never got round to using it.

So now at home I have my collection sitting in a drawer consisting of:

1 x MP100
1 x Dead MP2000
1 x MP2100
1 x Sharp branded MP
1 x eMate 300

I wonder if they will be worth anything in time to come?

For anyone who wants to know more of the ins and outs of the Messagepad there is a good page of information here.

Posted in Gadgets