Gizmodo has gotten their hands on a video demo of super secret project inside Microsoft called Courier. Courier looks to be an evolution of the tablet PC only designed more like an actual notebook. It’s composed of two touch screens hinged together (at least they look hinged together, the demo never shows the device in any kind of closed state). Though the two screens seem operate independently of each other, but the demo does show items being dragged from one to the other. The demo also shows that Courier supports both multi-touch and the use of stylus. All in all it looks very slick.
I’ve been a long time fan of the concept of a super PDA. I had a iPaq pocket pc back in the day, I have both an iPhone and a netbook now. I always thought there was a market for something that was as functional as a laptop, but would fit in your pocket (or maybe small hand bag). Ideally what I had always envisioned was something that was as small as a PDA and as fast as a laptop, that could be used on its own while on the go and used with a dock with a monitor and keyboard when at a desk. One computer that does everything everywhere. Or at the very least one computer that could take the place of my laptop and PDA/smart phone.
When the Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) platform was unveiled a couple years ago, I thought maybe my dreams had come true. But UMPC’s never took off, I’m guessing because they were too expensive and overpowered for a PDA but underpowered for most everything else. The iPhone/iTouch is easily the best phone/PDA I’ve used, but it’s not going to replace my netbook. There are still a lot of things I need a bigger screen and a little more processing power to do. Netbooks got the price right but, but not the form factor, they are still too big, I still have to have a laptop bag. With that said, my main complaint with netbooks is that the screen resolution is too low, 1024 x 600 is just a little too low to be practical.
Which poses the problem, how do you make a small, reasonably fast computer with a usable screen resolution. I think Microsoft maybe on to something with Courier. It’s not the the dock-able super PDA I was hoping for, but it’s still looks pretty cool. A tablet that can be folded up means it’s much easier to carry when not in use. And when it is in use, you have the real estate of two 7-inch-ish screens to work with. And with the nifty UI possibilities shown in the demo and I could see this being a killer device. The Courier could fill that awkward gap between PDA/smart phone and laptop, or for a lot of people, replace them all together. Assuming MS can keep these things cheap (like netbook cheap), they might have a winner on their hands.
In what could easily be a April fools joke, but is not, Google has released the Google Chrome Frame plug-in for IE6 and up. Basically, it switches out the IE HTML/JavaScript engines with Chrome’s, effectively making IE6 equal to Chrome. Developers have to insert a meta tag in the header of their HTML to tell IE to use the Chrome plug-in, so the Chrome engines only kick in when required, not all the time. So all those legacy web sites that were written specifically for IE6 will still work (in theory.) Tech Crunch has the story.
As someone who works for a B2B company where a large percentage of our audience are still using IE6, I really hope this catches on. IE6 has become on the bane of the existence of both web developers and designers alike.
Netscape Founder Backs New Browser
Marc Andreesen is backing a start-up called RockMelt, which is supposedly working on a new browser. It’s browser wars 2.0!
When Google released the Chrome Beta they positioned as more of a web app development platform than a browser, I wonder if that’s RockMelt’s plan as well. I could see room in the browser market for browsers that are for specific uses and end up being transparent to the end user.
Arc Technica has a write up the recently released alpha of Haiku, an open source operating system based on the now defunct BeOS. Looking at the screen shots of the Haiku UI brought back some memories. I remember sitting in my cube at a Macintosh clone manufacturer I worked for (remember Mac clones?) messing around with one of the early releases of the BeOS. It had a slick interface with candy colored icons. Everything about it was fast, it booted fast, launched applications fast (what few apps that were available), dragging and dropping seemed faster even though it probably wasn’t. And to a Mac user in the late 90’s, it showed the potential of what the PowerPC chip could do, potential the MacOS itself would not leverage for years.
Many people, myself included, thought that Apple was going to buy Be and that the BeOS was the future of the MacOS. Instead Apple bought NeXT (and bought Steve Jobs), in the long run an obviously better move. Be struggled for a few years, was bought by Palm and then faded into obscurity.
I think it’s great that Haiku exists, but I have to wonder with the increasing popularity of Linux (and the various distributions there of) and Google’s introduction of the Chrome OS, not mention the already established Windows and OS X, if there is even a place in the market for for a rehash of the BeOS. Even positioning it as a netbook OS is stretch, the line between netbooks and notebooks is already blurring and netbooks haven’t been around that long. Pretty soon even a netbook will be able to run a full on version of Windows without much of a lag. But who knows, maybe netbooks will get cheaper instead of faster and someday that $50 netbook you see at Target will run Haiku.