DigitalDiscuss

Courier is a real device, and we’ve heard that it’s in the “late prototype” stage of development. It’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft’s brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who’s spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a “pocket” to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

For an animated demonstration of this, look here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg7853cTtD8

Shaving some size and weight off the average GPS handheld or foldable map, MAPTOR, designed by Jin-Sun Park and Seon-keun Park, displays your maps via a pico projector no larger than a tiny flashlight. The concept includes a built-in GPS receiver that provides you with a little red dot of your location, so that you can quickly get your bearings. Read the rest of this entry →

Microsoft is preparing to launch software for GPRS “feature phones”  in developing markets around the world. The software will allow the light, low-cost phones to  support Twitter, Facebook and other Internet content, bringing popular app content to phones that would otherwise be unable to offer it. Feature phones are an inexpensive smartphone alternative that combine calling and one or two other applications. The software called OneApp will be unveiled in South Africa, and Microsoft plans to extend it to other nations where feature phones are popular including India and China.  Amit Mital, corporate vice president of the Unlimited Potential Group and Startup Business Accelerator at Microsoft, had this to say: “”We designed OneApp from the ground up on feature phones with very limited memory and processing capabilities. OneApp will be able to help people do things they couldn’t do before with their feature phone — anything from paying their bills to helping diagnose their health issues or just staying connected with friends and family.” [via Yahoo Tech]