Microsoft Courier Tablet: or, back to the future
by at September 24, 2009 12:37 pm
Sections: Operating Systems, Rumors, Windows
|
Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell Magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
That was then…
The year was 1987, and Apple was shopping around visions of what computers might look like in the future—when people wouldn’t sit down and type/mouse their way around. Instead, Apple imagined the computer with a speech interface, where the computer could speak information to the user and respond to a user’s vocal input. The device was called the Knowledge Navigator, and it was a vision of the future where information would come from multiple connected sources; the computer functioned as a portal to these (check out its Wikipedia page for all the details). Remember that command lines still largely ruled the day, and the mouse still had an uphill battle to broad acceptance, and you can begin to see why this idea was revolutionary. The device was never real, nor were any working prototypes built that actually performed like the Courier in the leaked videos, but there were still amazingly accurate prognostications in the demos.
Think about gathering data from the internet using search engines today (a manual process, at best, that can turn up massive amounts of garbage data). The Knowledge Navigator was proposed in one scenario to be a way of navigating large quantities of hyperlinked data. Here, a college professor is using it to compile data for a lecture (watch closely for the reference to the year 2006):
What about deploying computers in the classroom? They can be used to teach reading and writing, but require some fundamental skills that are still not widespread in computers even now. Here, an older man is using a pre-defined reading lesson, but then jumps into a more complicated scenario:
This is Now…
In the Futureshock video, we see this hypothetical device performing searches and displaying results, then conveniently letting the user downsample to find just the data he’s looking for (it feels hokey, like when TV cop shows blow up security camera footage and achieve spectacular levels of detail to identify suspect’s faces). This is still a pipe dream, but one that both Google and Microsoft are working to make a reality. Just look at Bing’s value proposition: it is not a search engine, in the traditional 10-blue-links-on-a-page way. It is rather a “decision engine”, that is supposed to understand what you are looking for and help present you relevant content to make a decision. (Shall I go to hawaii? I see here discounted airline tickets and a cheap hotel, so I guess I will go!) Later, in the same video, we see a video call with some filesharing going on—now that is a vision on which Apple has delivered (other people have delivered it too, but never in as slick a way). Not only can we share files, we can also seamlessly share video and share control of our desktops using iChat.
In the Parkbench video, we see a Knowledge Navigator assisting someone on the opposite end of academia (the audio intro is slightly cut off; in the original, it was a panel discussion regarding education, technology, and teaching adults). More pieces of this vision have come to pass, though not in quite the slick, unified way seen in the video. OCR software has advanced to the point that it can be included in iPhone Apps like Evernote, though this capacity is admittedly handled server-side after you snap a photo. The ability to direct a computer’s attention to what you are focused on is also not as easy as doodling a box around the text, though you can zoom a camera to focus, so we will give that one a 50% completion score. Likewise, there are no products with screen-cum-cameras built in, though Apple does own a patent for that one. Speech recognition and text-to-speech programs do exist, and the Alex voice included with Leopard is almost as smooth as the one seen in the video, though no programs exist that integrate them quite as smoothly as the demo video portrays.
What is most striking about both videos is the strong resemblance they bear to both the Apple Newton and the iPhone; the apps, the functionality, even the interface seem to prove that Apple was on to something 22 years ago. Tapping an app to silence audio and double tapping to move in are both extremely natural gestures, while squiggling around with a pen to enter text can also be natural given the right form factor of the device…which brings us back to the Courier tablet.
Tomorrow…?
The leaked video of the Courier tablet does make it look like an incredible product. (Anybody remember that satchel computer that Inspector Gadget’s niece always carried around? Shout out in the comments if the Courier video took you straight back to the ’80s.) Apple has made it clear that they have already delivered their version of a netbook in the iPhone and iPod Touch, but a dual screen, intelligently multitouch device might actually have a place between the iPhone and the MacBook Air. The iPhone OS looks perfectly suited to handle such a device, and the hardware could be pretty amazing as well. So, where does this leave Microsoft’s little prototype?
In the first place, it is wonderful to see Microsoft finally rethinking pens as input devices, rather than as mouse replacements. Using a pen to try and manipulate a scroll bar only a few pixels wide is a recipe for failure, frustration, and the occasional bout of cursing. With this transition from pen-based navigation to gesture-based, one must ask the question, how many arms do the designers assume their users will have? If you have multitouch gestures on two screens, that is at least two hands. So you hold the pen with what? Perhaps free juggling lessons could be included with purchase? The multitouch gestures demonstrated in the video look cool, as well, except for one problem: none of them are intuitive based on what is presented on screen. If this is a demonstration of what-might-be-possible, hats off. If this is a user interface demonstration, then the device needs a trip back to the drawing board. (On a side note, would it have killed the artist who put this together to use one of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth images, rather than Google Maps for the client address portion? I’m just saying…)
Hardware and interface questions aside, the mind turns naturally to software. More specifically, what exactly will this thing run? Apple successfully integrated their separate Newton OS into desktop programs using the Newton Connection Utilities, and iTunes has stepped up to the plate as a great way to manage the connection between iPhone OS devices and desktop computers. It remains to be seen just how robust an OS the forthcoming Windows Mobile 7 is going to be – will it have enough power and extensibility to support a desktop-like experience (as iPhone OS does)? If not, Microsoft will have created another slick gadget that is marginal, at best, when it comes to playing nicely with others, a lá XBox and Zune.
In the end, if this device is real, Microsoft will likely get credit for bringing it to the market first, but Apple definitely gets points for dreaming ahead of the times.
Related Posts