Microsoft Courier tablet is a digital journal with two screens

Friday, 05 March 2010 23:50 Mathias Wedelholm

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Microsoft logo The good folk over at Engadget have gotten their hands on details about and pictures of Microsoft's mysterious Courier tablet, which should arrive sometime in H2 of 2010. Courier is a very unique concept that moves away from the traditional PC experience and over to some sort of digital journal or sketchbook, combined with web-related functions and apps.

Courier is shaped like a small notebook with two multi-touch displays and is incredibly mobile with dimensions of about 7 (L) * 5 (W) * 1 (H) when closed. It is supposedly based on Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform which combines a 1GB dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with an Nvidia GPU. The result is a powersaving platform that, among other things, can handle 1080p full HD video playback.

The user interface appears to consist of a number of apps (for example calendar, albums and browser) plus what seems like an endless amout of blank pages that you can use for what you like, be it writing, drawing, scrapbook, or something else entirely. It seems slightly complicated, but very clever at the same time. Everything you do on it can be swiftly uploaded to a personal blog which can be accessed by selected users.

The OS is supposedly Windows CE 6, and as shown by the videos on Engadget's website (do check those out) there is neither keyboard nor mouse, physical or otherwise. Instead you use your fingers to flip through pages in the journal and interact with objects. For example, you can quickly copy pictures from websites on one display and paste them right into your journal on the other display. It also has the classical multi-touch functions like zoom and rotate, of course.

The other type on input is the stylus, primarily used for writing (Courier has built-in handwriting recognition). It is what you will be writing in website addresses, notes in the journal and entries into the calendar with, so it's probably not optimal if you want to write extensive essays and such. It goes very well with the concept of a mobile and versatile tablet though, which also happens to have a webcam.

There is not much official information for now, but we are looking forward to hear more from Microsoft as Courier seems to be the exact type of device that would fit into the magical segment between PDAs and netbooks/laptops.

Microsoft Courier