The paperboy has thrown another missive onto Gizmodo’s welcome mat, with some more details about the radical Microsoft design for the “Miniature Surface Zune Tablet” or as they insist on calling it, Courier.

They have a new video posted showing the concept in action again…this time focusing on a wide ranging office task. Beyond that, The paperboy has some other interesting headlines, including…

The heart of Courier appears to what’s called the "infinite journal," which is what it sounds like: A journal/scrapbook that is endless, bound only by storage constraints (presumably). Hopefully they will call it something less awkward. The journal can actually be published online, and it’s shown here as able to be downloaded in three formats: a Courier file, Powerpoint or PDF. There’s also a library that looks a lot like Delicious Library, where things like subscriptions, notebooks and apps, are stored.

This interface does share a few things in common with the other one: In particular, the hinge between the screens is still used as a pocket to "tuck" items you want to move from one page to another. It also still revolves almost exclusively around using the pen for input: In 4 minutes of video, there’s not a virtual keyboard in sight. Fingers are still used just to navigate, through flicks, swipes and pinches.

Looking at the video glimpses into the ideas behind this device, The Paperboy notes we have yet to see any traditional media player aspects. No indications you can use it to watch movies or listen to music for example. It seems to me that the Courier will be far more of a creative work tool then the proposed Apple Tablet is expected to be. That is not very surprising, considering the Consumer focus of Apple as opposed to the Enterprise focus of Microsoft.

Overall the UI as seen in this video makes me think of OneNote on steroids. Not a bad thing, but perhaps a trifle more limiting then one would expect from the hardware shown. Of course, this is all still prototype, so who knows what or if the final product will be in a few months.

Gizmodo is promising some more specifics about the GUI in the very near future, so stay tuned as J Allard (or whoever) continues to make secret phone calls to the Gizmodo dudes from the Microsoft parking garage.

Zealot (473 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).