It was finally confirmed on Friday that the Newton Personal Digital Assistants from Apple Computer Inc will be built around the Advanced RISC Computing Ltd ARM610 RISC: Apple says that the first version of Newton will be out early next year, and will be an electronic notepad, able to record and recognise handwriting and to straighten out rough sketches; Cambridge-based Advanced RISC Machines, which is owned by Acorn Computers Plc, Apple and VLSI Technology Inc says that Newton has an object-oriented executive and that the memory manager in the ARM610 provides specific support for object-oriented data handling; VLSI and GEC Plessey Semiconductors Ltd are both fabricating the chip, and Sharp Corp will use it in its own variants of Newton, which are also due out early next year; Newton will use 20Mb Flash memory cards for storage.
