Another Microsoft Courier Video, Shows Pen Input

Leander Kahney ()

microsoft_courier

Gizmodo has another mockup video of Microsoft’s Courier tablet concept showing how the device might be used for creative work.

The heart of the system is an “infinite journal,” an interactive work area that’s used to store and work on photos, handwritten notes and messages from colleagues.

But in four minutes of video, there’s just the pen. Fingers are used for navigation, but all the input is via pen and handwriting recognition. There’s no virtual keyboard to be seen.

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It’s a pretty compelling vision of how a touchscreen device might be used in real life. I’m half convinced, but I can’t help feeling it won’t work. A tablet device has to be multitouch, not pen-based, otherwise it’s going to be  mainstream flop. History has shown, pen-based systems are niche products. The future is fingers.

6 comments »

About the author

Leander Kahney

is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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Posted in Apple, News, Rumors, Tablet |

  • David

    I like the fact that apple.com was shown in the browser history about half way through the video.

  • Fearless Fred

    Sorry, Leander, but fingers aren’t accurate enough for quite a few of the tasks that I’d like a tablet to be able to do. If I want to annotate a picture or drawing, what’s faster, calling up an on-screen keyboard and typing it in or writing? When you touch a screen, a typical finger contact is about 8mm. Just think of the three circles at the top left of your current window. Now put your finger over the centre one. Notice how your finger’s covering part or all of the other two buttons? Fingers are great for selecting larger icons, but when it gets to smaller sizes or more complex tasks such as using your finger to write on the screen, they’re no good. on-screen keyboards can help, but they take up valuable screen “real estate”. Plus, typing on a screen isn’t as easy as typing on a keyboard. Even on an Apple keyboard, you can tell if your fingers are sitting fully on a key or if they’re sat over two keys without looking. On a touchscreen, you don’t have that feedback, so the process is typically slower as you look between twhat your typing and the virtual keyboard. A pen would allow you to do some of the text input by hand which is a lot quicker….

    Fingers are fine for navigation around pages, between applications, large scale selection, etc. When it comes to finer selection, speed of input, etc, the pen is mightier than the finger (if you can allow me the misquote!).

  • Poppa

    will it still have message popups?, i.e. your journal needs to send an error report, send or don’t send?

  • Ictus75

    Hmmm, the folding screen is a fail – the area is small enough anyway, dividing it into 2 halves is very limiting. Are thy trying to be Nintendoesque? I can see it now: work on one side, not on the other. FAIL.

  • Xavier

    I second the comment on the pen, and hope if Apple is going for a tablet it will include a pen. One point more to what fred said. When you touch, you don’t see where you touch, so you can’t be sure you touched the right area. Try playing “go” on a touchscreen (or even sudoku on a small touchscreen phone) with your fingers. Not only the pen is more precise, it does not hide what is precisely touched. If only we could have transparent fingers…
    Having both pen and finger is clearly a big plus. I would however also advocate for a touch keyboard. In big devices it can be much more intelligent, behing half transparent so it does not reduce significantly your workspace, and one writes on a keyboard much faster than with a pen.
    pen + finger + onscreen touch keyboard
    It will in the end of course depend a lot on the OS and the market for the device. For a note-book (ie, a book to write notes, not a laptop), it might be fine as it is in these animations. To compete with netbooks, a more “normal” OS would be needed, with terminal and keyboard.

  • Chris

    Well, it seems the pen is missing from iPad. Have you used a Win7 tablet? The text input handwriting recognition is FANTASTIC. I agree that you need multitouch but unless you have a good pen input…well it will be a great book reader I think.

    The problem is that pen input is equated with the ‘supposed’ flop of the tablet PC. (‘cept just about everyone sells one) It is not the pen that hurts it. It is the interface and programs that are not built from the ground up for pen tablets.

    Check out Ink Seine…you see some great ideas from Microsoft Research.

    -c