When the Newton was released, it was considered to be years ahead of its time, and when it failed, most people tried to use that reason for its failure as well. But I never really bought that. I mean, sure, the Newton was way ahead of its time (and in some areas still ahead) but I think it failed for other reasons. One reason is obviously syncing. The Newton used a whole new way to manage applications and data, which didn't sync well with the Mac, which did things "the old way". The connections between items in the Newton database was not easily translatable to Mac desktop applications. Plus, those desktop applications didn't even exist at the time.

Another reason was its size, which was perfect for scribbling on, but too big to actually carry around in your pocket. Palm solved this, by sacrificing lots of things the Newton had, and succeeded by creating a thin and light PDA that did the basics adequately well.

But PDA's are dying a slow death today. People don't use them anymore and they are being replaced by laptops and mobile phones. And Apple is making both of those product categories now, so why would they enter a platform which no one uses anymore?

WebKit
Well, it's basically that simple. When Microsoft fought tooth and nail over the browser platform, they missed the point of the web. They didn't win anything since what they should have fought was the web platform, which is a huge platform today. You can substitute many of your desktop applications to web applications today. Mail, notes, todo lists, project collaboration, bookmarks, photo albums and so on. It's all out there and usually it's free or at least inexpensive. You don't have to worry about upgrades and it is usually designed to work in any web browser. That's what MS missed, when they focused too much on the applications that delivers this platform.

Apple has a very unique position now. They have introduced Dashboard and widgets, small efficient middleware applications. They're not web applications and they're not desktop applications. They're something in between. They leverage things from the desktop world (cocoa, opengl, spotlight) and combine it with the powers of web applications (flickr, delicious, gmail) and serve it up in a special environment (Dashboard). Plus, they're dead easy to make. Pretty much anyone can make a Dashboard widget, and with Dashcode, Apple is making it even easier.

In Leopard, widgets really should go to the next level, and be able to be run outside of Dashboard, as real OSX citizens. There are already tools that let you do this today, but Apple should have OS support for this, plus enhancing the functionalities for the widgets.

Which brings us full circle to the Apple PDA, which should of course run OSX, like the iPhone. But it wouldn't run desktop applications. It should run Widgets. Widgets downloaded by the user for the purpose he or she wants for their PDA. You're in the process of redecorating your kitchen? Make a Widget search and download the "Kitchen Interior" widget, which may look something like this and helps you pick colors when standing in the store, saving it to "www.decorations.com" or something like that. And download the (Price comparisons) widget to enter prices for different kitchen parts so you can easily enter the data and compare prices when in the store. That's when people want a PDA, when they're standing somewhere with a problem that is easily solved with some help from a CPU.

Apple should provide a "bridge" for Widgets to talk to and save data to and from web applications such as flickr. Or rather, a framework to make other be able to make such bridges, where you have instruction sets, much like how Sherlock search engines used to work, with what form data that could and shuold be sent, login names and such.

The Widget database should, like today, be kept by Apple and you search and download Widgets directly from them and download directly to the device. Multi-touch is combined with handwriting recognition with a stylus. I'm not saying that the Apple PDA should be a third device. I'd be happy if it was rolled up in one device with the iPhone, but I'm thinking that maybe it should be a tad bigger.