For instance, you can add, delete, or move around the pages in your notebook, and use digital ink to jot down notes or draw nice little pictures on those pages. You can also add photos to your notebook pages, whether those images are coming from your hard drive, the cloud, or straight from your computer’s camera. The dev team says that Project Austin will also be compatible with other Windows 8 apps, naming e-mail and SkyDrive specifically, meaning that you can send your notes to those apps once you’ve finished them.

Microsoft dev Jorge Pereira says in a recent post on the Visual C++ Blog that “much of the inspiration and code for the Austin app” is drawn from Courier, so perhaps we can consider this to be something of a spiritual successor to the canned project. However, there are other reasons this group of developers created Project Austin, with Pereira saying that the team wanted to show what C++ can do when coupled with Windows 8. “First, we wanted to build a fully functional real-world app that’s actually useful and high quality,” Pereira wrote. “Second, we wanted to demonstrate the power of C++ and the Window 8 platform, and showcase some of the new technologies delivered by our team in Visual Studio 2012, such as C++ AMP and automatic code vectorization.”

Project Austin will be available soon (Windows 8 isn’t out until October 26, remember), and Pereira goes into much more depth about the app’s history and its development in the write-up on the Visual C++ Blog. This post is the first of a planned six that delves into Project Austin’s development, so expect to hear more about it soon. Eager developers can get an early peek at the app now, however, as the development team has made most of the source code available. If you’ve got a few minutes to spare (it is Saturday after all), be sure to read through the entire post on Project Austin – it makes for a very fascinating and exciting read.

In a sense, Samsung has done what Microsoft threatened to with the Courier concept: create a tablet which is singularly at home when it comes to digital note-taking and researching. True, it doesn’t have Courier’s slick folding dual-screen design – though I can’t help but wish Samsung would bolt two Galaxy Tab 7.7 slates together, throw in some proper digitizers, and make the super-slim clamshell of my dreams – but it ticks the important boxes. Flexibility of how apps occupy the screen; precise digital inking; easy snipping and collation; and a platform that’s as useful in consuming content as it is at allowing its creation.

Samsung has wisely woken up to the fact that it’s context, not cores, that makes a device successful. I’ve written about that before, as a challenge the Android hardware industry (and the chip manufacturers whose silicon powers those devices) faces as a whole; in short, it’s easy to wax lyrical about how potent your processor is, and how many pixels it can push, but it’s a lot tougher to explain to a consumer why that should be important to them. It’s something Apple does well with the Retina display on the new iPad: not just resolution for the sake of it, but explaining why it has a positive impact on photos, text and video.

The promo video for the Galaxy Note 10.1 loses marks for not using an actual device – renders have a horrible tendency to cover up what lag actually exists – but otherwise it’s a great success. Samsung doesn’t dwell on geek-frotting elements like how many cores are present, or what the resolution is, or how much RAM is inside, unless they have a legitimate impact on usability. Instead of meaningless “lifestyle” posturing, it’s all about how the apps actually work with the hardware and provide more value than if you bought, say, an ASUS Transformer or an Acer Iconia Tab.

Now, that’s not to say that the Note 10.1′s clever split-screen software will remain its own prized possession. One thing that has become commonplace among Android devices is that fancy software quickly gets ripped and baked into unofficial ROMs, sharing the goodness among other devices. In some cases that’s even before the official implementation has hit shelves; Samsung’s own experience with its Flipboard exclusive on the Galaxy S III, ripped from a test build and shared before the new phone went on sale, springs to mind.

Samsung’s edge, though, is in the combination of hardware and software that makes the Note 10.1 special. Yes, S Note and other other custom apps will likely work – or be made to work – on non-Note tablets, but they’ll lack the precision and flexibility of the special stylus. That’s a strong motivator to buy the official product, and something – in a world of identikit hardware – we rarely see.

The Note 10.1 still has to live up to its promises – we’ll have to wait for the first reviews before we see if the stylus is accurate enough, and the hardware capable enough, to deliver true split-screen usability and replace our paper notebooks – but Samsung has given it a starting advantage few Android tablets ever manage.

What you’re going to be looking at are the following: Notepad by Catch, Evernote (with Skitch), Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile, and Note Everything. This list is of course limited to apps that can be downloaded and used by ANY Android tablet. Each of these applications has its own set of pros as well as some cons, most of the cons being layout and user interface diversity. What you’ll find is that these apps strengths lie in their ability to connect with one another, the cloud, and essentially any other app in your library, as is very often the case with Android in general.

Evernote with Skitch has a nice ability to bring you into a deep web of connectivity – Evernote is known for that kind of excellence. Autodesk’s Sketchbook Mobile is made more for a smartphone and isn’t quite optimized for the tablet sized screen yet, but offers the most diverse set of paintbrush abilities. Notepad by Catch and Note Everything both have the ability to very easily help you collect a diverse set of notes at the tip of a hat, and both share quite well – as it true with the rest of the apps for the most part.

Sketchbook Mobile will cost you [$1.99 on the Google Play App Store], Evernote [is Free] and Skitch [is Free] as well, Notepad by Catch [is Free], and Note Everything [is Free]. Of course several of these apps also have upgraded versions and in-app add-ons that will cost you extra cash, but the basic functions are free for all.

It should be plain to see that this selection doesn’t quite add up to what the iPad currently has for notetaking and otherwise perfectly optimized media-collecting apps. We’d like to encourage developers (as well as those in a position to support developers) to create apps with much more diverse abilities than these – and in the very near future! And you readers out there: if you know of any other applications that you feel should be added to this list, don’t be shy – let us know!

It hasn’t been an easy route to market for Taposé, with Apple turning away the app on several occasions. Most recently the company took issue with the dual-window design the notetaking app uses. ”Apple has finally approved Taposé” the company writes. “It only took four months, three rejections, one appeal win and then reversal of said appeal, management UI review, and then one more final review for good measure to get Taposé approved.”

That approval has been granted with most of Taposé’s multitasking features still intact. The app allows for contacts to be emailed and pages to be printed – using AirPrint – without dropping out of the app to do so, while media imports can include handwritten text, PostIt-style notes, snippets of maps or diagrams, photos, audio, video and sections of other journals, in addition to contacts data and links. A “wrist guard” feature promises palm-rejection style technology to allow you to rest your hand on the iPad without it being picked up as a tap.

Meanwhile, the team behind Taposé claim that work is about to begin on v2.0 of the app, and that we should expect vast improvements from that. “If you like 1.0, then 2.0 will blow your mind” they tease, “it’s like comparing the first iPhone with the 3G, if many of you can remember back that far.”

We’ve been playing with the app for a short time, and first impressions suggest there’s plenty of potential – and some rough edges. Not all of the graphics seem up to speed with the new iPad’s Retina Display, looking pixelated and crunchy in places, and at times it grew sluggish. We also had some mistap issues, and at times the on-screen keyboard would instantly flick away before we could touch anything. However, on the flip side it was easy to snip sections from webpages into a notebook and then annotate them. Some of Apple’s restrictions may continue to impact on the app, too; for instance, there’s a block on accessing Safari bookmarks.

Taposé is available from the App Store for the iPad, priced at $2.99 [iTunes link]. Your purchase gets you 400MB of cloud storage with the company; unlimited storage is $29.99 per year.

“Apple rejected due to rule 10,4 stating that Tapose presents multiple windows at once” the company wrote on its Facebook page. “We created an alternate where the Slide Bar couldn’t separate the screen into two to at least get an approval. They still rejected citing a screenshot of the open Journal as evidence of the multiple windows. This obviously is not multiple windows and even if it was, they are being extremely inconsistent with this rule in approving apps.”

Courier caught the imagination of geeks a couple of years back, when details of the dual-display clamshell tablet first leaked. The product of Microsoft skunkworks Pioneer Studios, collaborating with Samsung for hardware, the tablet was to be a digital notetaking platform with a tightly defined set of talents – browsing, clipping and journaling – rather than the catch-all of regular Windows slates.

The project was axed, however, and Pioneer Studios subsequently shut down, but hopes that some of the Courier magic might be carried over to the iPad – albeit without precise digital stylus support – were ignited at Taposé’s reveal last year. It seems Apple doesn’t share the same enthusiasm, however.

[via GottaBeMobile]

In Allard’s vision, Courier owners would have a smartphone or other device to check email – Courier would support web-based accounts through the browser, but not the company’s Outlook software – and use the dual-display clamshell tablet to take notes, sketch out ideas and generally brainstorm. Although based on Windows at its core, the OS would have been stripped down to basics, removing the familiar UI and streamlining what remained so as to be swift and responsive to pen and touch input.

That didn’t sit well with the competing tablet strategy within Microsoft, based on Windows 8 and capable of running all the apps a regular PC might. As we saw in our own Windows 8 tablet preview, Microsoft has done a decent job in making the Start UI finger-friendly, but Courier would’ve been a step or two beyond that.

“It was not off-the-shelf tech … There is no commercial product today that meets the specs we had for it. It was highly demanding and innovative and no one partner had all of the pieces” Anonymous Courier team member

In the end, despite the Courier team already planning brand strategy, marketing and other pre-launch details, and having the various hardware details – including custom kit from manufacturers like Samsung – all operating on different prototypes, Microsoft pulled the plug. Instead, the company will come late to the tablet market with Windows 8, though OEM partners are already preparing: ASUS documents spotted earlier this week confirm the company intends two flagship Windows 8 tablets in Q3 2012.

Pioneer Studios’ offices in downtown Seattle are now empty, and the staff employed by the three-year long project have either moved to other positions at Microsoft or, like Allard, left altogether. The team included designers Microsoft had in part stolen from Nike and other companies, in an attempt to bypass the rigid structure the firm had become hamstrung by, and allow innovation to percolate up more freely.

Microsoft has other, similar idea incubators, and of course there’s Microsoft Research which has been responsible for pulling new technology into the company’s product line. Still, it’s disappointing to see Pioneer shuttered, even if as co-founder Georg Petschnigg admitted the team had a roughly 20-percent success rate.

This app comes from a couple of engineers who are reinventing the cool Courier dual screen layout and usability with an app for current tablets. The app doesn’t have the stylus capability that the Courier offered, but it does have the dual screen style. The Tapose app is being designed for the iPad right now and there are reportedly plans for an Android version too. The idea is that the user of the tablet could open two things at once.

For instance, one side of the screen can run a web browser, while the other side runs a document that the user is working on. The user would be able to drag and drop things from one side of the window to the other. That is very cool and I know it would be useful for anyone who uses the web to research and write a document. Tapose is apparently in alpha form right now and won’t hit the market until late summer.

[via TabletPCReview]

While the EP121 will happily let you stab at Windows 7 with your finger – or two, since capacitive multitouch is supported – it’ll also let you whip out the included active stylus and get far more precise. Art apps are the obvious beneficiary, with the Eee Slate turned into a self-contained Wacom Cintiq, but there’s also digital handwriting recognition for a surprisingly accurate alternative to onscreen keyboards. Float the stylus nib above the screen and you can move the pointer without making a selection, for hover functionality; there’s also pressure recognition, so the harder you sketch, the thicker the line.

Unfortunately, most users have only ever come across two types of touchscreen: the resistive panels common on pre-iPhone smartphones and the capacitive screens Apple’s handset helped popularize. Active digitisers are something most people are unfamiliar with, so they associate a stylus with a dumb plastic toothpick, something that’s most likely a compromise for undersized on-screen icons. Throw in the generally underwhelming experience of resistive touchscreens on commercial devices – in markets on self-checkout machines, for instance – and you can see how it could be boiled down to a two-player battle in which capacitive technology pulls ahead.

Microsoft isn’t helping things with software, either. Devices with active digitisers – or hybrid pen/touch displays – generally run Windows, and the Microsoft OS still falls well short when it comes to tablet usability. It’s been more than eight years since Windows XP Tablet Edition launched, and while the handwriting and speech recognition engines have improved behind the scenes, visible tablet accommodation to the end-user has barely evolved.

Ironically, Microsoft has had the answer – or at least a potentially significant part of it – under their nose all the time, in the shape of OneNote and the team responsible for it. Billed as a digital notetaking app (which supports searches of handwritten notes, among other things), OneNote is actually a great example of how Windows and stylus control can work together in a way far more intuitive and flexible than putting finger to screen.

For a while, with the Courier project, it seemed like the company had recognized its strengths and was set to take advantage of them. Rather than the “must do everything your desktop does” attitude that infects current Windows tablets – and leaves them mixing pen, finger, keyboard and mouse paradigms and failing at them all – Courier looked set to do one core set of skills very well, something that no other current tablet offered. Rather than ASUS’ Eee Pad models, which bill themselves as ideal for content-creation as well as consumption and then deliver that by merely bolting on a physical keyboard, the active stylus would have allowed for precise digital handwriting and sketching – with pressure sensitivity, angle recognition and more.

No, perhaps it wouldn’t be the best device to run World of Warcraft on, or to do your company spreadsheets, but Microsoft appeared to be finally saying that some things were best left to your desktop or notebook. Courier could have been another step on Microsoft’s path to an Apple-style ecosystem of devices and services – all held together by its beloved cloud – and offering not just a facsimile of the iOS platform but a legitimate alternative based on something Steve Jobs refuses to countenance: that a stylus can still be a legitimate input option for a mobile device.

This isn’t meant to be an eulogy to Courier, but nor is the stylus ready for its obituary. The iPad has made great strides in popularising the tablet segment, but it’s also left Apple’s rivals scrabbling to create me-too alternatives that offer buzzwords like “content creation” with little more than a half-hearted nod from the spec sheet. The irony is that Microsoft is probably in the best starting place to take advantage of that, and yet seems the most reluctant to use its position.

The EP121 is far from perfect, but it’s also no iPad-clone and for that ASUS deserves some credit. The stylus-savvy will recognize it for its strengths and make up their own minds whether the hybrid display and Windows 7′s naivety balance each other out. They won’t have much in the way of choice, though; look at the tablets announced at CES 2011 this month, and you’ll see the vast majority avoid the stylus like the plague, in preference to solely finger control. Unfortunately, until the tablet segment matures enough to countenance anything other than another would-be “iPad killer”, the stylus will continue to get its unfair reputation.

Basically, while Apple would have it that any need for a stylus means the interface designers have failed, Microsoft is taking a different approach.  They seemingly recognize that much general control is indeed suited to “blunt” fingers, but that there’s still a place for an accurate active stylus, for instance in text entry, editing and precise selection.  The company’s Microsoft Research arm has previously shown a video demo of how that interaction could work.

One such combined gesture illustrated in the patent application shows a user spreading a selection of files with their fingertips and then drawing out individual documents using the pen.  There’s also hovering support, which fingertip interfaces – aside from some concepts we’ve seen – don’t have.  As to whether Courier might ever be resurrected, that seems unlikely; however, we still hold out hope that Microsoft could release a Courier-style pen-and-stylus centric OS build for the growing number of tablet producing OEMs.

[via WMPowerUser]

According to the description, Microsoft were trying to replicate the real paper experience: the lifted page would have increased transparency, showing signs of the text on its reverse, while flipping repeatedly would quickly whip through two or more pages.  It’s speculated that the project was part of Microsoft’s Courier research, and could’ve been used as part of their digital notebook.

“One or more pages are displayed on a touch display. A page-turning gesture directed to a displayed page is recognized. Responsive to such recognition, a virtual page turn is displayed on the touch display. The virtual page turn actively follows the page-turning gesture. The virtual page turn curls a lifted portion of the page to progressively reveal a back side of the page while progressively revealing a front side of a subsequent page. A lifted portion of the page is given an increased transparency that allows the back side of the page to be viewed through the front side of the page. A page-flipping gesture quickly flips two or more pages.”

Meanwhile there are also refinements such as two- or three-finger scrolling, which could move the on-screen page rather than step through individual pages.  Microsoft will likely have their work cut out for them proving that this hasn’t all been done before.

[via GoRumors]

“I’m really going to take a step away,” he continued, “and challenge myself on some of these fronts that have just been musings in my head.”  Bach’s departure, meanwhile, is being described as a retirement; he himself has described the move as happening at “the logical time” based on his family plans and the direction his teams are taking.

Microsoft are putting David Treadwell in charge of the core technology group inside the Interactive Entertainment Business, responsible for the Xbox and gaming unit.  Steve Ballmer’s email regarding the departures is reproduced below.

From: Steve Ballmer

Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2010 11:01 AM

To: Microsoft – All Employees (QBDG)

Subject: Executive Leadership Transitions

After almost 22 years with the company, Robbie Bach has decided to retire from Microsoft. I have worked with Robbie during his entire tenure at Microsoft, and count him as both a friend and a great business partner and leader. Robbie has always had great timing, and is going out on a high note – this has been a phenomenal year for E&D overall, and with the coming launches of both Windows Phone 7 and “Project Natal,” the rest of the year looks stupendous as well. While we are announcing Robbie’s retirement today, he will remain here through the fall, ensuring we have a smooth transition.

Concurrent with Robbie’s retirement, I am making several organization changes to ensure we have the right leaders in the right positions as we set ourselves up for the next big wave of products and services. Effective July 1, Don Mattrick, who leads our interactive entertainment business, and Andy Lees, who leads our mobile communications business, will report directly to me. Don and Andy have built out strong leadership teams and product pipelines, and are well-positioned for the years ahead. Independent of Robbie’s decision, J Allard (currently serving as senior vice president of Design and Development for E&D), will also be leaving Microsoft. Given his ongoing passion and commitment to Microsoft, he will remain as an advisor to me, helping incubation efforts, looking at design and UI, and providing a cross-company perspective on these and similar topics. With J’s change in role, corporate vice president David Treadwell will join IEB to lead the core technology organization, reporting to Don. David has a great set of accomplishments at Microsoft, most recently working on the Windows Live Platform Services team. Over the next several months, Robbie and I will work together to finalize reporting and structure for the rest of his org.

Now that Office 2010 has been launched to business customers, Antoine Leblond, senior vice president in the Office Productivity Applications Group, will take a new role as senior vice president for the Windows Web Services team. This team brings together the integral Windows services that today deliver updates, solutions, community and depth information for the Windows consumer. Kurt DelBene, senior vice president in the Office Business Productivity Group, will take on all of the engineering responsibilities for the Office business.

Transitions are always hard. Robbie has been an instrumental part of so many key moments in Microsoft history – from the evolution of Office to the decision to create the first Xbox to pushing the company hard in entertainment overall. J as well has had a great impact in the market and on our culture, providing leadership in design, and in creating a passionate and involved Xbox community, and earlier being at the center of our work seizing the importance of the Web for the company. But most important, both have been great team builders with a strong record of attracting, coaching and growing talent. As a result, their teams are primed to continue to step up and deliver great products, great services and great results for the company. Don has led the Interactive Entertainment Business since July 2007, where he’s significantly grown our entertainment footprint as well as our profitability. He can count as successes the evolution of Xbox Live, the launch of blockbusters like “Halo 3″ and the much-anticipated “Project Natal.” Previously, Don was president of Electronic Arts Worldwide Studios. Andy has led the Mobile Communications Business since February, 2008, and has been instrumental in reinvigorating our mobility efforts, bringing in new business and development talent and overseeing the creation of both KIN and Windows Phone 7.

As we finalize and ship so many of our key products (“Project Natal,” Windows Phone 7, Office 2010, Windows Live Wave 4 and others) it is a natural time for us to look ahead and make sure we have the right talent in the right roles to fuel our next set of offerings. I am confident that the changes above will set us up well for the months and years ahead.

I want to close by thanking Robbie for the incalculable contributions he has made to Microsoft over the years. He will be greatly missed when he retires this fall, and I am glad that I’ll have the opportunity to continue working closely with him between now and then. And as J makes a similar transition, I look forward to working with him in a new way.

Steve

[via Engadget]

According to some sources speaking with ZDNet, it looks like Chief Technical Officer J Allard (of the Xbox and Zune Team fame) is currently on a sabbatical from the Redmond-based company, but with the Courier getting axed, he may not be returning to the company at all. Allard was “the champion” of the Courier, and believed wholeheartedly in its success in the market, but CEO Steve Ballmer did not feel the same way. This may have lead to some personal disagreements between the two men, which boiled over with the cancellation of the electronic journal device.

Microsoft, of course, have no comment on the situation, and their site still lists Allard as an employee. What this tells us, is that the man who knew Xbox would be a success, knew that the Courier would have been too. That just makes us want the Courier even more, and wish beyond all wishes that Microsoft hadn’t decided to can the project. Now we’ll just have to see what’s next for the company, and hope that it’s anywhere near as good as the concepts we’d seen in the past.

[via ZDNet]

The problem is that people assume that a tablet PC is just a big Windows Mobile phone, and the fact that access to the latter has generally been far greater for most means that conception seldom gets challenged. It’s a belief that leaves them sadly short-changed, too: most mainstream users – indeed, likely a fair few techies too – made the jump from resistive touchscreens straight to capacitive panels, without ever having properly experienced the accurate delight of an active digitiser.

An active digitiser, as found in a “proper” tablet PC (rather than the pseudo-models with resistive or capacitive screens that are generally aimed at a finger-favoring home audience), recognises that your fingertips are never going to be as accurate as a fine stylus point, and it wants to give you back that precision. We’re not talking some plastic toothpick here, either; an active digitiser uses a special pen, usually from Wacom (who specialise in high-precision graphics tablets), that the display recognises: not only the difference between contact and no contact, but pressure and angle of touch, even whether the silicone or polythene nib is hovering slightly above the surface.

A stylus has come to be seen as an apology for a bad UI, a way of making undersized or tricky on-screen controls accessible when fingertips won’t cut it. Ironically we’ve lost sight of the stylus as a legitimate input method in it’s own right; ironic because while in computing the pen is seen as niche – the domain of artists and the unenlightened – in the real world there are many more people who can write than can type.

What hurt – and continues to hurt, Microsoft’s ongoing efforts notwithstanding – tablet PCs beyond the limited mainstream access was that its good uses of the stylus were hidden behind an admittedly underwhelming UI. Microsoft made the bare minimum of iconographic changes, amounting to little more than the option for bigger versions of mouse-centric buttons, and grafted on an under-appreciated handwriting recognition engine that left users feeling one step removed from the OS and whatever mainstream apps they chose to run. The underlying flexibility of Windows – that you could load any software that would run on a regular, non-tablet PC – only served to emphasise the removed nature of the pen input. Titles like OneNote and the bundled Journal (both of which could leave handwriting in place but, thanks to background character recognition crunching and the accuracy of an active digitizer, allow you to search through your notes as it’d they’d been typed in) made it all the more obvious that everything else was a hodge-podge of mediocre usability.

Contrast that with Apple’s approach to iPhone OS, at the debut of the first-gen iPhone and all it’s various iterations since. As opposed to the apologist “it runs everything” approach Microsoft took, Cupertino archly scythed out any functionality that wasn’t entirely conducive to finger input. Copy and paste was the most notable victim of that stance; Apple chose to cede numerous rounds in the PR war with rivals rather than push out a feature that didn’t quite live up to stylus-free control. There’s a sense that the appeal of Microsoft’s recently-culled Courier project wasn’t so much a latent desire for digital versions of Moleskine notebooks but an expectation that, by cutting away any obligation to play nicely with Excel, PowerPoint, or any of the other legacy apps existing tablet PCs promise to run, the company would be liberated to create a platform where the pen wasn’t expected to deliver anything more than it’s own role, would no longer be compared – and found lacking – to a plain old mouse.

As I’ve written before, I still think – hope – that Microsoft plan, if not to release a Courier device of their own, then to at least take the purity of purpose the project represents and bake it into a custom OS for third-party manufacturers to try their hand at. In the tablet market at the moment the obvious plan is to follow what Apple have delivered – a completely finger-centric environment – but perhaps there’s space within the segment to take a different approach, to say “people love to write and sketch and touch and generally play with their creativity, let’s give them a device that caters to that.” The likelihood of Apple themselves releasing the “artist’s iPad” rumoured for a while seems low to non-existent; wouldn’t you think it would be liberating, as a company in the consumer electronics industry, to broach a niche without the spectre of Cupertino’s finest over your shoulder?

To discount the stylus, as Apple have done and their evangelistic users continue to do, is to blinker yourself not just to the afterthought plastic toothpicks of disappointing Windows Mobile phones but to the UI possibilities of pen-computing at its potential best. If you ever reach for a Post-It and a Biro instead of your iPhone to jot down a memo, or write your “Dear Diary” entry long-hand because there’s something reassuring and human about the arc of your cursive, ask yourself: is that a gap, an under-explored one, that remains in the market? The reality distortion field may be telling us the stylus is dead and buried, but I’m not so sure.

Wishful thinking? You’re probably right, but I’m remembering MSI’s dual-display prototype that’s been wheeled out at a few trade shows now, and recent talk of a Toshiba Tegra 2 based “dual-screen model running Windows.” Both have been anecdotally compared with what we’ve seen of the Courier project.

Of course, that dual-display MSI notebook is facing problems of its own, the biggest being battery life. According to a recent Engadget report, MSI’s Andy Tung has said that “the two screens are a major drain on the battery, and even with a higher density battery and the Menlow CPU we are only getting three hours [of runtime].” The prediction is that the device won’t arrive until Q4 2010 at the earliest.

That’s a similar timescale as attached to the Toshiba tablet, which was fingered for late 2010 with Compal doing OEM duty. Toshiba themselves have confirmed that it’s on the cards, though is set to be more expensive than a single-screen Android version they’re also apparently looking into.

To be honest, such a move – providing a software solution, rather than taking the helm in hardware – would be a better fit with Microsoft’s general approach: giving OEMs the OS and letting them do their own thing with the physical product. That’s certainly the way they’ve played it in the past with the Tablet PC functionality integrated into various iterations of Windows, whether as a standalone version (like Windows XP Tablet Edition) or, as in Windows 7, baked into certain feature builds of the platform. There’s also the much-underrated OneNote digital journal app to consider, software which – while it will work perfectly well on a regular computer – really comes alive when used with pen input, with handwriting recognition, the ability to search through inked notes, OCR from pasted in photos and just the sort of life-recording that Courier seemed to promise.

Microsoft have been pushing pen and touchscreen input more and more with each OS release, and OneNote has been gradually making moves from the distant cousin of Office to an inclusive part of the Office Home and Student package. If it were me in charge, I’d avoid dipping my toe into competitive hardware waters – risking defining the niche to the detriment of manufacturers coming up with their own alternatives – and instead focus on pulling the technology in OneNote into a custom Windows build (multitouch and gestures included), and linking it up with the existing online tools like Windows Live Spaces blogs.

NVIDIA have been telling us for months that their latest Tegra chipsets can deliver not only 1080p HD performance but extreme power frugality, and it’s not unusual to find Tablet PCs with dual-mode displays that can automatically flick between finger-touch and stylus input. Alternatively we’ve seen plenty of rival chipset manufacturers with products capable of driving multiple simultaneous displays.

You’d need to solve three key issues for it to work: price, battery life and market positioning. The first is always going to be tricky, matching not one but two touchscreen panels with wireless-enabled components small enough (and sturdy enough) to make for a pocket- or bag-friendly device. Battery life is, as MSI have discovered, a make-or-break factor; however, when you ditch Intel’s CPUs and look to ARM-based platforms, far more interesting things are possible. Look at the 10+ hours of runtime Apple’s iPad is capable of for evidence of that.

Hardest still, though, is giving would-be buyers a reason to welcome a Courier-style device into their lives. Apple have a head-start in a way, what with the almost devotional levels of appeal the brand has to many people; the iPad was guaranteed a strong debut for that reason alone. For all that the “it’s just a big iPod touch” criticism must have rankled over at Cupertino, in the end it at least drew connections between the iPad and a paradigm consumers were familiar with. The growth of blogging, sharing-focused microblogs like Tumblr and social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are all strong examples of spontaneous – and personalised – content manipulation and distribution that Microsoft could, if they’re clever, use to illustrate their new idea. Yes, perhaps it’s unlikely, but several months ago we were ready to write off Project Pink over talk of internal collapse, and Microsoft still brought Kin out to play. Time will still tell whether that particular project succeeds, but at least Microsoft showed they were willing to give it a chance.

The Courier first broke cover at the end of last year, and since then it’s caught the love of tablet fans all over the place. The second time we got a real good look at the concept of the tablet, our interest was piqued considerably. It made it all worse when rumors broke that the dual-screen digital journal would be using Tegra 2 under the hood. Simply put, the Courier was one of the best conceptual ideas to come out of Redmond in a long time, and we’re sad to see it go.

According to Corporate VP of Communications Frank Shaw, Microsoft is always testing devices, building them up from concepts, and that’s exactly what the Courier was. Just a design, and at this time, Microsoft has no plans to build the Courier for a market release any time soon. Now, one would have to wonder if this has anything to do with the iPad at all, let alone the very idea of a webOS tablet. Is the competition just too much for Microsoft, that they figure staying out of the market is just a better idea? Or, is the Courier something that Microsoft built to make something better we haven’t seen yet?

[via The Wall Street Journal]