Microsoft rarely manages to elicit a positive reaction from me, and I don’t know why. Is this a learned behaviour? Do I cringe at the sight of every expensive new Redmond operating system simply because I sit in the company of Linux devotees and computing idealists all day? Do I express such bile for the utterly contemptuous form of the Zune merely because Microsoft doesn’t deem the UK as a worthy market for its release? Are these actually great inventions that I have simply been conditioned to reject by my environment? I’m beginning to think otherwise.
This is not because I suddenly think Microsoft is great. No. Take the frankly lazy recent release of Windows Phone; it’s an example of something brown and sticky that the juggernaut has simply coughed out of its right lung and deemed good enough for user consumption, despite the public moving on to better things many moons ago.
No, the odd thing is that I find myself actually coveting a forthcoming Microsoft product. I must be ill.
It’s called the Courier. It’s a dual-screened tablet, with a nifty interface combining capacitive multitouch and pin-point stylus input. It has one button, no keyboard and a super-clean design to match. Its cute little notepad OS seems both fashionable and highly suitable for pen-based interaction and casual web browsing. And this is from Microsoft? Wait a minute.
At this point the Courier is at a very early stage. Perhaps it doesn’t actually exist beyond one promo video and a whole lot of hype. There’s definitely something fishy about it, namely that it is almost exactly what I would imagine an Apple tablet to be. In functionality, in appearance, in philosophy: Apple.
Now, I’m no Apple zealot, I promise you. I own an iPod Touch, which I barely use thanks to its infuriating insistence on communicating only with iTunes. Instead, I use a more sensible MP3 player which appears to my PC as a hard drive. I refused to buy an iPhone in favour of the cheapest, most basic mobile handset I could muster. I have an iMac at home, but half of the time it’s booted into Windows 7 doing decidedly non-Apple things. Similarly I have no great affinity towards tablet PCs; I’ve owned several, and grown tired of their gimmicky tablet interfaces within hours.
But this is something else. The Courier is the tablet PC that the public has been begging Apple to make. It is truly a genre definer.
One short video – the preview I’m so enamoured with weighs in at under a minute and a half – is all it has taken for Microsoft to insert its future hardware firmly into the Universal Lifestyle Computing bracket pioneered by Apple’s handheld devices. I don’t care if Universal Lifestyle Computing isn’t a recognised bracket. It is now. I recognise it. And I recognise that companies like Nokia and Sony are desperately trying to weasel their way into that bracket with shamelessly Apple-aping products.
Essentially this boils down, once again, to me making myself progressively more angry with myself. I can’t stand the prospect of becoming a computing hipster. I have so far managed to resist the ULC onslaught, but if I start buying balsamic vinegar and in-season olive oil, wearing drainpipe jeans and aviators and strutting around Bath with all the latest gadgets shining out from within my brown leather satchel, it’ll be Microsoft’s fault. Luckily the grumpy part of me is positive the Courier won’t be nearly as cool as it looks.
