Mobile Blogging Via Newton

Apple’s Newton Message Pad, which was discontinued in 1998 sure has been getting a lot of press lately. It seems like everytime I turn around some other Newton freak has figured out a way to keep these devices current. Wired is running a story about Mike Manzano, a blogger who is using a Newton as his main input source.

Manzano fitted his MessagePad with a Wi-Fi card that sits in one of the Newton’s two PC Card slots (it uses a driver written by a Newton user in Japan).

Manzano writes in longhand, running his posts through the Newton’s spell-checker. “It’s got really, really great handwriting recognition,” Manzano said. “Natural and accurate.”

Manzano e-mails his posts to his TypePad account, a hosting service run by Six Apart, publisher of the popular Movable Type blogging tool. The TypePad service does a lot of the magic; it’s set up to accept blog entries by e-mail, making it very easy to maintain a blog from just about any e-mail-capable device.

The story goes on to talk about other Newton-based bloggers, and how people are soldering bluetooth chips into the motherboards to allow them to transmit images from digital cameras and blog those.