Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 23rd Sep 2009 17:32 UTC
Microsoft While half the world is waiting for Apple's take on the tablet - pretty much guaranteed to arrive somewhere next year - Microsoft has come out with a very interesting new take on the tablet, the Courier. It's a dual-touchscreen device, shaped like a book, and is in the late prototype stage of development.
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RE: Details
by n4cer on Thu 24th Sep 2009 07:09 UTC in reply to "Details"
n4cer
Member since:
2005-07-06

What sort of touch-screen? Pressure, electrostatic, what? Can we fold it up 'normal laptop' style and use one screen as the keyboard? Does it use a standard Win7 install, a standard Vista install, something Windows Mobile, or something else?


See MSR's Codex for the likely origin of this device:
http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/alpineinker/archive/2...

Unless E&D plan to make this a constrained device (e.g., ARM/WinCE, device-specific applications), it will likely run Windows 7 to utilize the built-in inking and multitouch APIs, and take advantage of the existing TabletPC (and general Windows) ecosystem. They'll probably use Wacom or N-Trig's capacitive multitouch digitizers, as newer Windows 7 optimized tablets (recently updated versions of the Fujitsu Lifebook T4310, T4410, T5010, and Lenovo X200) are now using.

The main question I have is whether this will be a Microsoft-produced device or a spec/reference platform for ODMs (or maybe both). I could see it working as the latter if MS controlled the baseline platform spec as they're planning to do with Windows Mobile 7 devices. Otherwise, it would probably be best as an MS device.

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