Microsoft is working on a new tablet PC, codenamed "Courier." It could be here soon or might be a year or more away. And, no, Microsoft probably doesn't much care what Apple does.
Will this be Microsoft-branded, like the Zune and Xbox? It still seems unclear. Looks like they're going to debut it at their upcoming meeting. It looks pretty sweet, but I still think I'd like a keyboard. A keyboard and screen on the inside, like a regular netbook; and a second screen on the outside that works like an iphone, when you just need to touch, scroll, and go.
It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we've all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft's astonishing take on the tablet.Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.
Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft's brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who's spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.
Microsoft has a history of collaborating with other firms, especially in the E&D division: Zune and Xbox have both gone through similar design processes. (And plans for the Microsoft Store leaked through a third-party agency were confirmed as genuine prototype layouts and concepts.) This video is branded Pioneer Studios, a Microsoft division within E&D that specializes in this kind of work, working with another agency that's a long-time Microsoft collaborator on confidential projects.
The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple's tiger style. It's complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a "pocket" to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft's tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we've seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.
Over the next couple days we'll be diving much, much deeper into Courier, so stay tuned.
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The latest episode of the Robots podcast takes a closer look at the emergence of communication - and how it can be studied using robots. The first part features an interview with Sara Mitri, an interdisciplinary researcher at Switzerland's EPFL and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Mitri and colleagues have taken an unusual approach to the problem: Using the ground-based S-Bot robots (pictured above) as a model for biological organisms, they used artificial evolution to study complex behaviors like communication. And as the broad media coverage of her recent publications in Current Biology and PNAS show, the advantages of this approach have not gone unnoticed: While retaining many of the real-world complexities present in biological systems, the robotic models allow complete access to all model parameters. And there is another key advantage: Today very little is known about the evolution of phenomena like communication, because they leave no trace in the fossil record. By conducting artificial evolution, this work allowed to reconstruct part of that missing evolutionary history and shed light on the origins of communication in all animals, from simple cells to us humans. In the second part of the podcast, Jürgen Jost, director of the "Complex Structures in Biology and Cognition" group at Leipzig's Max Planck Institute discusses the question of intentionality of robot communication. Tune in!
