For those who are looking for alternatives, a new one might be just around the corner. Remember the old Newton? Check this out:

http://www.kallisys.com/newton/einstein/

Click on the "slides" button under the picture to get a resume.

Some background: "Newton" was Apple's operating system for the "MessagePad" series, discontinued in 1998 (ironically, just when Apple started doing it right). Since then, a community of users has kept the Newton platform not only alive, but evolving, including stuff such as (wireless) networking, support for newer memory cards, Bluetooth and much more.

Paul Guyot, author of "Einstein", has set his goal to transport the Newton operating system to modern hardware, using Linux as a bootstrap loader and underbelly.

Why Newton then? Well, I've used MessagePads and the Newton operating system is still the only OS that is not only easy, but actually intuitive to use with a pen. It also has one of the best (cursive and printed) handwriting recognition engines in existence: it is in fact the only HWR that has ever allowed me to take notes in meetings without being more cumbersome than pen and paper, or even a keyboard. Add to that a fairly intelligent parser that will transpose most natural questions into the equivalent computer commands (imagine writing "lunch with bill friday" in a window and have your PDA look up bill in your contacts list and write the appointment in your diary application. Newton really does that sort of stuff!) and you might get the inkling of the idea.

So, Einstein is still not finished, but it might be smart to keep an eye on it. If Paul gets the speed optimized and if he can finish his elusive "Relativity" middleware layer (he won't say much about that), Einstein could become the equivalent of KDE or Gnome on the Linux PDA platform.