I returned Tuesday evening from a month-long trip to Europe. The highlight of the final weekend was the inaugural Worldwide Newton Conference 2004, held at the Hungarian Institute in Paris, France. 8 years ago, I remember practicing Tai-Chi in the mornings right in front of that building! At the time, I had a PowerBook 180 and a Newton MessagePad 100. In 2004, I brought with me a PowerBook G4 12-inch and a Newton MessagePad 2100!

What’s with all the renewed interest in the Newton? It’s arguably still the most advanced mobile computing platform today. The handwriting recognition is still better than anything on the Palm or PocketPC platform today. Software developers have added support ATA storage devices, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, IrDA and OS X, technologies which either didn’t exist or were in their infancy when the Newton was cancelled in 1998. Palm still hasn’t managed to get their own Bluetooth SD card working on Palm OS 5 devices!

All of the speakers did a fantastic job with their presentations. We heard from Newton evangelists, luminaries, and developers on a variety of topics. If you want to learn why the Newton failed, you’ll want to read Roman Pixell’s forthcoming retrospective. Robert Benschop explained how he taught his mother how to use a Macintosh in 5 hours and the Newton in just 15 minutes. A number of the user interface elements, technologies, and ideas behind the Newton are making their way into Mac OS X — Inkwell, data sharing between applications, and screen-size independent applications. Nicolas Zinovieff demonstrated how to connect a Newton natively to an OS X machine with the Desktop Connection Library.

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Going through 3200+ images and finding the best ones to tell my European story is taking longer than I expected. I really dislike going through page after page of thumbnails and images. I’ve filtered down to about 1000 images. My goal is to have several hundred to share with you in the next day or so.

In the meantime, here are some photos from the Apple Expo in Paris, France. Phil Schiller introduced the new G5 iMac to the Apple Faithful at this conference. When I first saw it, I immediately thought “Ugh, a flattened eMac.” Up close, however, the iMac is a little more attractive. It is pretty amazing that they’ve fit everything into a 2-inch enclosure. Give it another year or two, and I think they’ll manage to fit all the components without the need for the bezel below the LCD display. Once that happens, the display will truly become the computer.

All that said, where can Apple go in the future with the design of iMac? I’m wondering whether or not Apple has painted itself in a corner where it can no longer innovate on the design of the all-in-one computer. There’s nothing left to the “computer” except for the display now. I’m curious to see in a few years what they come up with for the G6 or G7 iMac.

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