Home Computer: Apple falls short with Newton: It's an object of desire and fun to use, but would you buy it? Alex Renton decides to wait for the next version

Sitting on the train from Preston to the Tory Party conference at Blackpool, there was a political poet - freelance - with a Newton. I have not seen an adult so absorbed since Gameboys emerged.

Craning over his shoulder, I tried to discover what he was doing - and yes, it was just what I had been doing on my Apple Newton personal digital assistant - writing and scrubbing out, scribbling and correcting, trying, like a first-former, to get your handwriting to mean something.

'I've had it a month and I'm in love with it,' he insisted on the platform at Blackpool. I asked him what he had achieved on the train ride. 'Oh, I've written a note to the office that I'll fax to them as soon as I find a phone line.'

Thirty-five minutes to write a note to the office? 'Well . . . I was doing other things, too.'. Oh yeah? This was a man in that stage of infatuation where you will tell any lie to glorify the object of devotion. It knew his writing perfectly after a week, 'even the jolting of the train makes no difference'. What poems came out of his Newton I don't know, but (mildly) inspired I wrote a limerick on mine.

The xenophobia of Peter Lilley

Is offensive and really quite silly.

It's a bit of a fraud

To hate abroad

When you holiday in a chateau near

Chantilly.

This emerged as:

The dinosaur's stability

5872518 and really quite silly

It's city afraid

To hate Dorval

When you holiday in a Chilean near

Christine.

Fair enough. No one ever understands my handwriting anyway and the Newton has only a 50,000 word dictionary. It obviously did not know the word Lilley or Chantilly and it was unlikely to know chateau or xenophobia. So I tapped the Newton's screen, got up the keyboard, and entered these into the user's dictionary, which allows you to add words to the basic dictionary. A couple of minutes' work.

Then, working very slowly in best playschool handwriting, I managed to produce the limerick in recognisable form. Then I spent a few more minutes of scratching and inserting - getting your brain round Newton's rubbing-out methods is particularly difficult, though it is gratifying when things go right and the unwanted text literally explodes off the screen - and I had my limerick.

Except that new lines began at unwanted places - something I never managed to sort out. Much better was my caricature of jack-booted Peter Lilley, reduced on screen and copied to encircle the poem. Brain to finished artwork in 45 minutes. And it was fun. The Newton is not quite slow enough to make you cross.

If my political poet friend had been within three feet, I could, of course, have sent him both poem and drawing by pointing my Newton at his and using the infra-red beam. Or I could have borrowed his modem ( pounds 175 including VAT), downloaded the poem to my own PC-compatible computer, or faxed it to my office. Who doubtless would have liked to know when I was going to do some real work.

Real work, I did not do. The notebook is not, obviously enough, for getting down the thoughts of ministers in shorthand.

The political poet told me that it had taken him a month to get up to steam on his Newton, by which I imagine he meant inputting all his address book, a lengthy task, since one would undoubtedly have to have done it with the keyboard. And you would have had to buy a 2 megabyte flash memory card - a credit card-size storage medium - at pounds 175. Even so, that stores only 250 names and addresses, not enough for journalists.

Starting to use the appointments and diary facilities would pose less of a problem - and I would enjoy scribbling 'Call John Major' on the notepad, to have Newton's pulse-dialler bleep out the Downing Street number two seconds later.

I would not buy this one. I might buy the next version. If Apple forgot to ask for this one back, I would probably use it. It is rather beautiful. I took Newton on holiday and it was the most popular gadget in the villa: everyone played with it for at least 25 minutes. But the duty-free was cheaper.

Vital statistics

System: Proprietary

Hardware: Arm 610 processor;

640K memory; 4.5in x 3in screen.

Add-ons include fax-modem

( pounds 175 inc VAT) and memory cards

(1 megabyte, pounds 175).

Software: Built-in, diary, note and database programs.

Maker: Apple Computer, 6 Roundwood Avenue, Uxbridge UB11 1BB. Tel: 100 Freefone Apple.

Availability: Retailers, dealers, mail order.

Price: pounds 645 inc VAT.