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Another day, another Microsoft leak reported by the folks at Gizmodo. This time it is two models (Turtle, Pure) of Microsoft’s long rumored Pink phone:
These phones are going to be made by Sharp, who’ll get to share branding with Microsoft. Sharp produced the Sidekick hardware for Danger, who was bought by Microsoft two years ago. Pink will be primarily aimed at the same market as the Sidekick, and the branding and identity for it is highly developed, pointing toward a later stage in the development cycle.
The prior relationship between Danger and Sharp is the only reason we can think of why Microsoft stuck with Sharp for the new phones, and perhaps why they look so much like remixed Sidekicks. The youth bent is somewhat surprising, if Pink is going to be their big consumer phone play, building off the expertise of Danger and members of the Zune team.
We mentioned the Danger acquisition in February 2008 at which point it looked like just a software play. The Sharp-Danger Sidekick itself was billed as a "hiptop" device that was smaller than a laptop or netbook but bigger than a cell phone, and the photos of the apparently chunky Pink phones do nothing to dispel that same impression. Moreover, the idea of a new form factor is a convenient way to avoid overtly antagonizing Microsoft’s main line cell phone partners who are dutifully licensing Windows Mobile. Still, would you want to buy your smart phone OS from a serious competitor?
So is Pink Microsoft’s answer to the iPhone or just a demo? Time will tell.
The Web is abuzz over Gizmodo’s report that Microsoft is working on a dual screen tablet PC called the Courier:
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.
I would be more excited if Microsoft didn’t have a long history of dabbling in PC hardware prototypes, all the better to spur on their OEM partners. It would be very surprising if Microsoft did more than show the Courier off as a "concept" PC at various trade shows and run it around to all their partners hoping to get a bite.
Moreover, pen computing has been around since the early 90′s and has never taken off because it has never been particularly usable. Putting two small displays in a binder is less interesting than some pen software that is really convenient and natural to use. That would truly be buzzworthy. As for touch sensitive screens, maybe the Courier would be a neat two person game machine.
Last week Microsoft Research held the 2008 edition of their annual Faculty Summit in Redmond complete with the release of free academic-flavored software tools and demos of Microsoft Research and faculty research projects. The biggest buzz was over the multi-touch Sphere display which uses a refinement of Microsoft’s Surface technology, but frankly it seems mostly useful as a prop for the villain in the next James Bond movie.
Looking over the full list of demo projects yields a number of others which are more likely to be of real utility including the following for "touch" fans which appeal to my prejudice that I don’t want my screen smudged up, thanks.
The UnMousePad
Ilya Rosenberg and Ken Perlin present the UnMousePad, a paper thin, flexible multi-touch device about size of a mouse pad. The UnMousePad not only continuously detects a multitude of touches, it also senses varying levels of pressure at a resolution high enough to distinguish multiple fingertips and even the tip of a pen or pencil. Because of its form-factor, it can be used for simple mouse input, for multi-touch gestures, or for a wide variety of interactive applications, such as games, 3D sculpting, 6DOF object manipulation, musical instruments, and interactive control of synthesized human voice.LucidTouch
LucidTouch is a new type of touch screen device. It prevents the user’s fingers from occluding screen contents by allowing users to interact with the backside of the device, yet providing visual control by means of "pseudo-transparency." The benefit of this approach is that it allows making very small touch devices, which is not possible with traditional touch screen technology.
When I starting reading the latter description I thought it implied worse contortions than the average desktop touch screen, but for small devices it seems interesting, not to mention novel. Here’s more (including videos) on both the UnMousePad and the LucidTouch.
Last night was the kickoff of the D6 conference and Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were the opening act. Aside from a little light comedy and some reminiscences, the big news was a teaser for Windows 7 which will have multi-touch support for PCs with the requisite touch screen hardware.
The applications shown seem to be PC versions (e.g. no bar coded foreign objects) of those demonstrated with Microsoft’s Surface table kiosk system (aka "Big ass table") which was demoed last year at D5. Touch screens have been around for Windows seemingly forever via third parties and while it may be useful for kiosk builders to have the support baked into Windows 7, it is hardly the kind of thing that will draw the crowds. Still, it makes a nice demo and that’s the point after all.
