Don’t know if you guys have watched this video of the as-of-now still concept device from Microsoft. You totally should if you haven’t. It’s insanely great. When I first saw this I thought that Hell had frozen over. It looks to me to be much more like an Apple product than the ipad and it’s from Microsoft who are rightly pilloried for their terrible approach to user interfaces and industrial design.
The reason why this excites me much more than the ipad is that it seems created for invention, for creativity rather than for the expensive consumption of media. The courier, if it ever gets built, could be used for the collaborative design of pretty much everything, for scrap booking and for the sheer enjoyment of creating something new as well as the now workaday e-book reader and web browser. The ability to cut, paste, draw and paint all together on one screen and save it to the cloud where other users can access it and bring their own ideas to it is incredibly exciting.
But wait. I have major doubts. Even if it is a real product and it really gets released (the videos show nothing which current hardware could not achieve) there is one major, MAJOR drawback. This is Microsoft. I thought they might have turned a corner with the release of Windows Phone 7 details. It looked amazing but more and more info slipped out making it seem that MS was doing its very best to cripple the OS with no multitasking, no copy and paste etc. Here are a few ways the courier could turn out shit.
1/ Handwriting on a sheet of glass is difficult and I haven’t seen it done well ever.
2/ It really would be a Microsoft thing to do to make this with, and i’m having trouble typing this, ‘resistive’ touch screens. One of the most hated phrases in our language.
3/ I really don’t see a point to this device without 3g. It really needs it.
4/ It is vital that the interface is as smooth and zippy as the videos show it to be. If it’s laggy then there is really no point.
5/ The courier need not be razor thin or feather light since you won’t be going for a run with it, but it really cant be brick like.
6/ This I think is almost certain to happen and, to an extent, is happening already. Watch the video, it’s totally marketed at the professional to make their lives easier. As a ‘productivity tool’ (another of those horrible phrases). This is Microsoft down to a tee. They make their products appear really boring, really ‘business like’. People don’t want productivity, they want fun and (I hope) they want creativity. This is what Apple does so well. Whilst the ipad is not a creative tool its master stroke is to sell its ease of use. It’s probably the least ‘techy’, and therefore the most accessible bit of technology ever made.
I’m really bad at this but I’ll try and put a price on it. I think $499 would be too much for this. $399 would be a good figure I think. Lets call that £300-£320. I’d pre order one now if I could.
(The video is from engadget)
6 Comments
It’s Microsoft… Unless they build a brand new OS for this it will be the same old Windows crap. There’s no way it will have decent battery life if its multi-task enabled. Two screens going at once… and such a thin encasing… I guess its a concept for a reason.
I don’t think there is any indication of the thickness here. But two screens going at once shouldn’t really be an issue if there are two places to put batteries. Or one side could be dedicated to components whilst the other was purely battery.
Multi-tasking will be necessary to an extent but only in the same way that the iphone already multi-tasks ie. Email, Browser and music all at once. I’m not sure if thousands of apps would really be necessary for this but I could see MS allowing it to run Phone 7 apps.
Enough battery to run two big screens for any length of time will put the device in the super-heavyweight category, surely? Not really ideal for a portable device. It’s a shame but battery life does hold a lot of cool ideas back.
Hey dude. Before I go any further I have to say that battery and screen tech is way, WAY beyond me. But the ipad screen is 9.5 x 7.5 which equals 81 square inches in area. That equation for the Courier mike be something like (7 x 5) x 2 = 70 square inches.
I’m sure there are lots of reasons why this comparison isn’t fair but I would say that it proves a rough point. I don’t see and real tech barriers to this. Just MS inability to make an interface.
Nice few posts Neil. This is very cool. The thing that struck me most is how intuitive the features are. It reminds me of a TED about a portable system where you interact with the world with gadgets on your fingers and a camera/ projector on your chest.
Microsoft are really changing. Google has shown them another business model and they are trying to assimilate it. They have the resources to allow some drag time. I expect great things.
Cheers bro. I saw the same video and it blew my puny little mind. My brain popped out of my head and hit someone in the face. I’ve watched it quite a few times since then.
I think its way too early to say that MS has changed for good yet (but gotta give mad props to such a big, sprawling company for trying). They haven’t released any of these new products yet. Lets wait until next Monday and see what they got for us.