Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret Tablet

By The Paperboy (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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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.

Microsoft Courier

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Kevin Rose On iPhone 3.0: Cut/Paste, Features Equal Palm Pre

By Jack Loftus

Digg's Kevin Rose is again peddling his Apple rumors, this time in regards to the upcoming 3.0 preview scheduled for this Tuesday. He was dead on last time around—can he do it again?

Now the good stuff. We've had two separate tipsters ping us with the rumors today, which Rose talked about last night during the live Diggnation show at SXSW in Austin.

The breakdown of unconfirmed rumors goes like this:

- Cut and paste in 3.0
- Users magnify or double tap a word to bring up cut and paste
- Pinch "boundaries" to select word(s); Rose called them "copy boundaries"
- Then you get option to cut, paste or copy

Also, the 3.0 update will have enough new features and additions to bring it up to the Palm Pre levels. Whatever Palm Pre has shown us so far, apparently, the iPhone will have too when 3.0 becomes official. That point remains a bit hazy right now, so anyone who was at Diggnation last night who can help elaborate a bit more would be awesome in my book.

Lastly, there will NOT be video, nor will there be MMS. Boo. This last point seems to contradict BGR's MMS rumor from the other day. [Thanks, Kyle and Abdul!]