Addendum #1 to my iPad Review:
Microsoft's Courier

Now it’s truly rare I find praise for a Microsoft product, but lately, I gotta say, I’ve found myself saying that quite a bit.  The bing.com interface is a thing of beauty, Windows7 has shown massive improvements to the OS, and Internet Explorer 9 shows Microsoft finally listening to the web community, and making themselves standards-compliant. All of these are great steps, but one that’s truly surprised me is their new ‘tablet’ device, named Courier.

Now instantly the name Courier conjures up the old typewriter font, and doesn’t exactly instill a sense of innovation or excitement. Granted, it’s a touch better than the ‘iPad’ moniker, but that’s not the only improvement. Their new Courier tablets show that Microsoft is beginning to “Think Different” by moving away from the iPad design to one closer akin to the Nintendo DS. This device can hardly be called a ‘tablet’, though it does address the same niche. In fact, the device seems more closely related to a Moleskin notebook than it does a tablet. Though it does lack many of the features of the iPad, and many desirable ones the iPad is missing (No camera?! Seriously?! C’mon people!), the double screen, stylus interface has quite a bit of potential. Not only does it build on a wildly successful interface design (the DS being the top-selling hand-held gaming platform in the world), but it offers a compactness and a greater sense of durability that the iPad or many iPad clones seem to offer.

Methinks Microsoft may have come up with something smart here… When the Internet gets flooded with frustrated iPad users who have cracked their touchscreens, and now face hefty replacement costs, Courier users will laugh as they fold up their ‘tablet’ and neatly slip it into a coat pocket. Not only is the screen protected in this format, but the stylus will prevent the screens from being smudge-covered petri dishes. Similarly, the Courier can fit into a jacket pocket, something an iPad will having trouble doing for anyone smaller than Andre the Giant.  Now while this smaller, dual screen display won’t be as pretty, especially when playing video (if it even can), it does speak to an audience of avid book readers that might be a bit older, but still somewhat Internet-savvy, who wants a device that will easily integrate into their Windows setup.  Microsoft knows that ease of integration will be crucial to the success of this device, and you can guarantee it will support MS Office, making it a sure fire hit in the corporate community.  In this capacity, it seems more of a competitor to the Blackberry than the iPad, somehow making the Courier the device that sits between the tablet and the Blackberry… an unusual, but profitable placement.

Here is a video from engaget.com showing how the device operates. What seems most peculiar is how they’ve gone after the design crowd with this device, biting at the core of Apple’s market. This video would perhaps better serve the Microsoft community if it showed people using Excel, Outlook, and Word on this device. 

The mix of stylus and finger interaction does seem a bit clumsy though.  Making use of the ‘pocket’ is an interesting feature, as well as the robust ‘infinite journal’, but it fails to capture the imagination the way the iPad does. Perhaps if this video was as brilliantly staged as a Jobs launch, and we got to see how it handles digital media, I’d feel more impressed.

Addendum

So after all the work, all the effort, it seems Microsoft has KILLED THE COURIER.  Engadget confirms this in an article posted earlier today.  Microsoft finally builds something unique, puzzling, unexpected, and full of potential… and then shelves it.  Sadly, I’m not surprised. I supposed the report that Apple sold 1 Million iPads during its first month on the market has forced a paradigm of usability on Microsoft that the Courier could never assimilate.  Expect Microsoft to come out with a more traditional “Windows Tablet” sometime in the future, if they don’t abandon the hardware market altogether.

Also, it seems the idea of a dual screen tablet isn’t dead, as the Kno tablet appeared at D8.