I’ve been keeping an eye on the Courier for some time, and in fact early demos of it have impacted my vision for what would make a perfect tablet. I’m not entirely sold on the idea of having two facing screens, though it certainly does have some interesting applications in making multitasking an intuitive and natural process. There is one important advantage to two screens though, Keith points out it is bigger than the iPad—but not when closed! Having a folding design like this keeps screen size high while increasing not only the portability of scale but the portability of durability. When stowed, the fragile faces of the device are completely protected by the hardware sides. The iPad will require a neoprene case at the very least, while the Courier will require nothing, at most a very thin [faux] leather book-style case.
I almost stated my thoughts on this back when the iPad threads were flourishing, but since my thoughts on the Courier were all based on old prototype demos, it didn’t seem prudent to compare them with something that was being actively demoed as a physical product. Who knows what bad decisions Microsoft would make between demo and actual product—assuming it ever became a product at all. Now I find this next “leak” and it looks like, oddly enough, Microsoft is still on the right track. This is where tablets should be going in my opinion. Rayz brings up a good point regarding Surface technology. It’s a mistake to say that Apple has been pioneering the touch interface; Microsoft has been there for a long time now and throwing (very likely billions) lots of money into what these interfaces should look like—what we should be able to do with them. You can see traces of the Surface philosophy in some of the videos of it, where objects can be moved around freely and become contextually aware of each other depending upon spatial proximity.
Microsoft has a horrible track-record when it comes to designing interfaces, for the most part. They don’t know when to stop adding things to it and routinely miss hitting the elegance curve, but that said they are getting better, and Surface wasn’t a bad implementation, just out of reach for the average consumer by a long shot.
The thing that intrigue me is the precision of the pen-generated samples I’ve seen. My experience with digital pen technology has all be with Wacom (though not their display/surface tech) and it has never really had the precision I’d like to see—where one can draw at a 1:1 ratio, or even write at a comfortable size. The shots I’ve seen of the Courier all seem to imply that their tracking technology has a very high resolution. This is probably benefited by being able to write directly onto the display surface. Wacom has very good precision, but so long as you are writing/sketching in one spot and having the results appear several feet away, it’s going to feel weird and be difficult to write without resorting to huge, 24pt equivalent letters.
I have found myself feeling precisely what Keith has stated: first I can’t believe Microsoft is coming up with a portable tech that seemingly “gets it” while Apple is so “missing it”, and secondly that if it is anything like what I’ve seen so far, I want one!; especially if Missing*Synch or someone can get it talking to Macs, or it has a USB drive mode that would do just as well.
I think the key thing here is that this tablet isn’t trying to be a computer at all. It is trying to be a notebook. As a writer, and a creative in general, that’s what I’m looking for in a highly portable digital device like this: something to replace the hours and hundreds of dollars I spend on paper notebooks and transferring information from one paradigm to another.
But, Microsoft could still easily kill this by locking it down (i.e. pulling an Apple). If the files aren’t RTF, open image formats, and so on, then it hardly replaces what I already have. If I can’t plug it in and download or upload information to it from the desktop, then what is the point?
