I bought a Newton MessagePad 2100 (the last model ever made) in 2001 and subsequently used it, a.o., in staff meetings at work, on construction sites and just about anywhere I needed something to take notes but had no actual room to take them on, so to speak.

I also tried Palms (with and without keyboards), tablet pcs, notebook pcs and paper notebooks. Nothing, and I mean nothing beat my Newton in terms of handiness, speed, keeping-uppiness and after-meeting finetuning. Most of my Newton notes could be mailed or printed out (OK, I admit I have a PostScript printer) as they were.

The handwriting recognition of the latter day Newtons is truly amazing: I get 95+% correct recognition of cursive Dutch and 99+% of cursive English (the Dutch libraries are a freeware non-Apple addon).

To get an idea of what Newton HWR was, I suggest people to try out PenOffice on a Windows tablet: it is the same HWR engine (actually only half: Newton has a separate HWR engine for printed text, called Rosetta, which is even more impressive). Only PenOffice advises a 500 mhz Pentium and 64 MB RAM as minimal hardware; the Newton has a 160mhz ARM and 4 MB RAM.