Non-starter
Microsoft has never confirmed the existence of a widely reported project called Courier, which was expected to yield a dual-screen hand-held device, combining e-reader functionality with handwriting recognition into a ‘digital journal', sporting a Tegra 2 chip.
That confirmation finally came yesterday, but only to pour water on it and say the project won't be resulting in a product any time soon.
In apparent response to a story on tech blog Gizmodo, Microsoft corporate communications VP Frank Shaw offered the following statement on the Microsoft blog:
"At any given time, across any of our business groups, there are new ideas being investigated, tested, and incubated. It's in Microsoft's DNA to continually develop and incubate new technologies to foster productivity and creativity. The 'Courier' project is an example of this type of effort and its technologies will be evaluated for use in future Microsoft offerings."
In other words, Microsoft has had a good look at the digital journal concept and decided it can't make a commercially viable product out of it right now. What a shame.
UPDATE - 11:00, 30 April 2010: TechCrunch is reporting that HP has also decided to pull the plug on its Windows-based slate device. These two cancellations may well be related as all concerned finally concede that full Windows is not a competitive OS for mobile devices.
We still expect to see an HP slate, but one based on the webOS it's set to acquire with Palm. The Palm acquisition will take a few months to close, but HP will already be committing a lot of resources to adapting webOS for slate devices.
