This is damage control. Microsoft is so afraid of Apple it needs to pre announce products that are no where near being shipped. Strange, since Ballmar has recently said that Apple poses no threat to Microsoft. If so, it is strange Microsoft would spend so much money gunning for Apple.

advance showing of concept products to damage other companies sales. They've been doing this for years. I'll bet all the MS fanboys will be getting excited about tablets and how successful it will be now that Microsoft is previewing a tablet . Will there be sudden shift of love from netbooks to tablets? Bill Gates had always wanted to produce a tablet for the masses and if he wasn't able to do it, then maybe he'll get Microsoft to do it now.

It's not going to be damaging to Apple because the Courier will basically be only hardware with nothing much else to drive sales. Sort of a scaled-up Zune HD again without content. Of course, they don't have a release time for the Courier. It was said earlier that most companies stopped with their tablet products until they could take a good look at what Apple was going to offer. So Microsoft is now going into the mobile hardware business. How is this putting pressure on Apple? There have been rumors that the Apple tablet will be released in 2010, so nothing has really changed and the Apple tablet is far beyond concept stage since parts orders have already been placed in quantity.

the year 2020.

Microsoft is undecided whether to name it the Zune Prune or suXBox.

Wow the video looks good. Unfortunately, given the poor execution history we will have to wait for V3.0 for something that really works. Of course by then the Apple tablet will be way ahead of the game.

Knowledge Navigator was a concept shown in a video by Apple in 1987 which was similar to this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Navigator

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8

If this would actually come out, school books would be gone. No more heavy book bags to carry around. I don't care who makes it. Just get it out. We should have been using this 10 years ago. Like any new product, it will take time to fine tune it. Way to go whoever made a device like this.

My first thought was Inspector Gadget's niece's "Computer Book" from the cartoon series....

Its amazing that you guys sit their claiming it doesn't exist, so we can't give it any credit; meanwhile, you tout the apple tablet, which exists even less than the courier.

Ammmazzzzing. Bunch of sad people you are. So bitter about competing products. How dare they compete with apple! Jeez. Someone should write a book about you weirdos.

I was surprised how much this looked like the Apple Newton I had in 1996. The Newton wasn't in color, but it had handwriting recognition (it actually worked!), notepad, outliner, calendar, address book, web browser, and cut-and-paste. Oh, and it had a lot of the cool intelligence features like those shown in the video. The Newton existed before WiFi, GPS, and capacitive touch-screens. And it ran on 4 AA batteries.

Apple killed the Newton, but kept the technology in-house. If Apple has been improving on the Newton technology for the past 10 years, I would expect something better than what Microsoft is proposing here.

The video actually made a good case for how a tablet device could be used productively.

..Knowledge Navigator, doesn't it?

If there's a version of Clippy on there and it's a dude with a bow tie, we know where Microsoft "innovated" this from, don't we? :-)

Looks pretty darn cool, which is why it will never see the light of day. MS is incapable of taking what looks awesome in the design phase and finishing off with an awesome product.

Look at the old 'longhorn' videos floating around in 2003, they were showing of a truly wicked OS. Then look at what was released in Vista. Nothing even close.

It looks neat now, but by the time its done, several UI changes which make no sense what so ever will have been introduced, making it another 'windows' type experience. It will be locked to some half @ss application store like the Zune Marketplace.

Trust me, it looks good on paper but they'll s**** it up, if they even get it far enough along to release it.

Well, I might have Macs in my house, but if MS comes out with this in production before Apple comes out with anything at all (or overpriced as usual), this would be a more convenient way to take notes in classes. Right now I have notebooks full of papers, occasionally lose papers...with this device all notes could be saved forever (and hopefully synched with a Mac).

As a Mac user with a open mind - I am interested.

The designer went a little too crazy and the Marketing guy loved it!

The screen actually folds out into tabloid format to makes news papers easier to read... that's on the missing 5th slide.... 6th slide is the best tactile feed back brail... for the visually impaired great stuff they really out did themselves.

So microsoft creates product concept animation as a reaction to an apple product that does not exists and somehow that is "preempting apple"? Sad. So sick of all this news and reaction to a product that exists only in bloggers fantasies.