Round 4: Usability

Mac fanboys will tell you that Apple computers are famed for their ease of use, but the Q1 lays the smackdown on the Newton in this category too. The Q1 features excellent handwriting recognition that quickly and accurately turns movements from your stylus (cleverly hidden away in the top right side of the unit) into proper text.

It's not just guess-work either -- the Q1 uses a neural net, which means that it uses several information sources to determine what you want to write, rather than trying to translate ink strokes into letters and words. For example, when you write 'ing' on the screen, the system looks at its dictionary, how you wrote the word, rules of grammar and more. If the 'ing' was written with the cursor immediately after 'walk', then you probably meant to add the 'ing' to create 'walking'. If the cursor was immediately after 'giraffe', it would make a different decision because 'giraffeing' is not a word. Best of all, you don't have to train it to understand your writing.

It's not all about handwriting recognition though -- you can tap away at a virtual on-screen keyboard using the stylus, or just talk to it and have it translate your words into on-screen text via the twin array microphones. Still not happy? Then how about the ability to bring up yet another on-screen virtual keyboard and tap the screen with your thumbs? If you're a control freak, the Q1 is your baby.

Samsung appears to have been afraid to commit to a purely pen-based control method, while on the Newton it's the sole input. You can sense Samsung's tentative approach to the stylus throughout the Q1 user experience. There are several escape routes from using the stylus on the Q1, including the touch screen input and direction pad controls.

The reason for Samsung's reticence lies in the vastly different origins of the two operating systems. The Samsung uses Windows, an operating system originally designed from the ground up to be controlled with a mouse and keyboard. The Newton, on the other hand, uses an operating system that was specifically programmed for pen-based input.

Handwriting recognition on the Newton MessagePad 2000 is surprisingly accurate even by today's standards. Wikipedia notes that "many users consider the Newton 2.1 handwriting recognition software better than any of the alternatives since". Indeed, a key part of the success of the Newton's handwriting recognition software is its "modeless error correction". If a word is incorrectly recognised, you double-tap the word and a list of alternatives appears in a contextual menu. You can write in a printed, cursive or mixed style and this is matched against a 93,000-word, customisable dictionary.