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Todays article we will be looking at the short lived Apple eMate 300. Apple’s late 90’s attempt to fuse the Newton PDA and laptop.
I won’t be taking this unit apart mostly for the reason of I do not actually own this machine and I’m borrowing it, thus I don’t want to risk accidentally damaging it seeing as I’m not very familiar with laptops and such nor do they particularly interest me. that said I didn’t want to pass up an opportunity to feature this interesting and kind of rare machine.
The eMate 300 was briefly sold for less then a year between 1997 and 1998, mostly to the educational market.
The eMate 300 comes in an all translucent green case and If I’m not mistaken is the first Apple computer to use the colored plastic motif that the later iMacs became so well known for. The plastic has actually held up fairly well over time and did not seem brittle to me.
Another thing you may notice is the eMate 300 kind of looks like a butt in tight green spandex. I’ve also been told it looks like a bust line, just the image you want to evoke for a device meant for the educational market…
Lets take a quick look at the specs for the eMate. The screen is a 480×320 resolution grayscale that operates as a touch screen with the use of the stylus. It does have a backlight that can be toggled on and off via a button on the keyboard and sort of resembles the look of the screen on the original Gameboy with the green soup look although the eMate screen does look much better.
There are some nice touches like the holes to place your stylus on either side of the eMates keyboard.
The CPU is a 25MHz ARM 710a RISC processor and the machine comes with 3MB of RAM standard. In a world with several hundred Megahertz Pentium and K6 CPU’s this feels like an extremely underpowered processor in 97/98 but remembering this was not meant to be an actual laptop but a beefed up PDA the power is acceptable for most tasks as far as I could see. Under the battery door there is an expansion slot that did make the RAM expandable via third party cards. There is also a headphone jack and PCMCIA slot on one side so adding things such as wireless and flash memory is possible.
On the opposite side of the eMate is a small sliding panel door that acts as a cover for Macintosh serial/localtalk ports.
Unfortunately I don’t have much else to say about the eMate. It seems like it was a good idea at the time but it never really caught on and sold very well. You could also at the same time buy the more traditional looking Apple Messagepad 2000 which was a more powerful and expandable PDF device.
As far as I know there are no games for the eMate 300 which makes sense as that was not it’s intended use nor does it even sport USB ports or floppy and/or CD drives to help facilitate such things. I did have some fun just mucking around on it. There are some neat features like the art program which lets you draw free form shapes and then the eMate sort of fixes them up. For instance I could draw a rough circle or triangle and the eMate would then adjust my hand drawn shapes to perfect circles and triangles. It was also neat to hand write sentences and then have the eMate transfer the hand written notes into text, although it didn’t always get things right.
Again, The eMate is a neat and pretty rare piece of Apple and computing history but it isn’t really my personnel cup of tea.
ancientelectronics 