Microsoft Courier

By now, most of you have seen Microsoft's concept touchscreen laptop at gizmodo.

There are some great, and not so great ideas in here.

First, I have to say making it look and behave like a normal notepad, just makes me realize how fantastic and enduring the notepad and pen is! But I do like the use of the pen, and I think this could be an important peripheral for MacProTouch (I will describe the design in detail)

Second, the hinge........sigh, the hinge. Basically this is a laptop, on its side, with two touchscreens.
And then there's that hinge, stealing some valuable real estate, and mercilessly cutting my large touchscreen on which I can watch a movie in wide screen, into two smaller windows.
Well I guess I could watch two movies at the same time!
But yes, not a big lover of the loss of screen size to hardware.

Also the swiping from one part of the screen to the other...........why? WHY!? OK, i get it, its supposed to be more a journal than a large drawing tablet, but still, I feel a bit cheated on that one. Surely the UI is small enough and well designed enough to collectively order my work in the appropriate way. I am not sharing a file from one screen to the other, I'm simply moving it, seems a bit pointless.

One thing I love is that the camera is at the back of the laptop, so you can take pics of what you're looking at, this is something I did not consider in the MacProTouch, but now an infinite number of possibilities opens up. Record videos of your holiday with your laptop then send them to your friends........perhaps that's too much power!

The UI is good, but i think it is a little unintuitive, in fact it seems messier than what I would actually do in a journal. (make this project my homepage? - apparently we still live in a single-tasking world where consultants only work on one project a time, heaven!)

But still, I'm amazed Microsoft is thinking this way, its great actually, and any innovation is better that none.

But, oh........that pesky hinge.

Wouldn't it be simpler to have a single screen and include a 'journal' software program that splits the screen into the Courier style design? No loss of features OR real estate!