One-time Apple CEO John Sculley, the PepsiCo misfit who was just reflecting for the benefit of the Daily Beast that maybe he should never have been CEO of Apple and maybe he should have brought back Steve Jobs a lot sooner, still seems obsessed with bringing the Newton - or its update - to market even if it means taking on Saint Steve and his "magical" iPad.

Unless something has really changed Sculley's got money in an eight-year-old Florida outfit called OpenPeak - enough to have rated a board seat - and OpenPeak just raised a tidy $52 million - from Intel among others - on top of a $30 million C round it got in late 2007 from Morton Topfer, the former vice chairman of Dell now a managing director of Castletop Capital, and RRE Ventures among others. And OpenPeak's got a PDA-style tablet or maybe it's a tablet-style PDA - Sculley is credited with inventing the term PDA - that may or may not give the iPad a run for its money.

The gadget may also be the phone call-capable tablet that BT means to bring to market soon, a gadget that's already sold - at least in a previous life form - by Verizon as the Hub and O2 as Joggler - and soon, it's said, by AT&T (Engadget says to think iPad pricing).

OpenPeak has apparently always had ambitions to replace the home phone with what Sculley called the "third screen."

The skinny new multimedia OpenTablet 7 - based on the power-saving 1.9GHz Moorestown Atom - which explains Intel's new interest - has a little something for everybody: Internet connectivity, e-mail, Linux, Flash, a 7-inch TFT LCD touchscreen with LED backlighting, front and rear cameras for video, stills and video conferencing, HDMI plug, microSD slot, integrated 802.11b/g/n Wi-FI, Bluetooth 2.1, cellular and USB 2.0 connectivity, built-in speakers, a microphone and a docking station for recharging and port replication. The thing measures 9 by 5 by 0.6 inches.

Applications - and reportedly it's already got "thousands" of them and they're supposedly platform-independent - can be written using Adobe's Creative Studio and OpenPeak speaks of a "fully partitioned" revenue-sharing white label app store.

In the all-things-to-all-people fashion of the times the dingus can also function as a reportedly promising home energy manager and it's got a deal for the thing with smart meter maker Intron.

Not all the latest round is equity funding; some of it is debt funding from Horizon Technology Finance and Velocity Financial Group and distribution finance and working capital from GE Capital.

The money is earmarked for product development and new markets. The company is also into multimedia phones and set-top boxes.

OpenPeak was started by CEO Daniel Gittleman, who sold his last company StorageApps (nee RAID Power Services) and its SANLink storage virtualization software to HP in 2001 for $350 million.

Oh, by the way, Jobs hasn't spoken to Sculley in 20-odd years.