Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wish there was a way to use my Newton on my phone or tablet?” Well now you can. For all of those Newton Users who have an Android device, you can now run the Einstein emulator.
Let me give you a little backstory. Back in 2005 Paul Guyot, a well-known and respected Newton programmer, released the first public version of his Newton emulator called Einstein. The original concept was to come up with a solution to make the Newton operating system hardware independent and possibly license the OS from Apple (1). That was going to open the way for new hardware and therefore keep the Newton platform alive. Unfortunately the project never got past the emulator step, but Paul continued to working and was able to build Einstein to run on OS X, Windows, and a few Linux tablets like the Nokia 770/800. In 2007 Einstein was released as open source software so other programmers could join in and help bring Newton OS to new devices. Once such programmer was Matthias Melcher (2).
Since 2007 Matthias has continued to work on Einstein to improve its speed, reliability, and functionality. 2011 has been particularly exciting because Matthias ported Einstein over to the iOS platform giving users the potential to run Newton OS on their iPhones and iPads. Unfortunately Apple rejected Einstein from being released in the App store and the iOS port is no longer being developed (3).
Now Matthias is working on an Android port of Einstein (4). An early build is available for download, but a lot of work still needs to be done to optimize the speed and reliability. Running the emulator on a Droid 1 is slow, but good enough to show off to friends. I personally can’t wait to see what happens to Einstein in the near future as devices get faster. What are you waiting for? Go dump the ROM off your Newton and get to emulating.
Have fun,
Tony
http://code.google.com/p/einstein/
(1) http://marc.info/?l=newtontalk&m=109452984605975&w=2
(2) http://marc.info/?l=newtontalk&m=118396241728586&w=2
(3) http://marc.info/?l=newtontalk&m=129745881308428&w=2
(4) http://matthiasm.com/einstein.html