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Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret Tablet

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

The author of this post can be con­tacted at tips@​gizmodo.​com

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