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When the Courier concept was first shown, I almost couldn't contain my excitement.

Now, ten years later, it feels like most challenges the Courier (and now the Surface Neo) tried to solve have been solved by bigger screens, better multitasking and great pencil support.

New note taking and productivity apps benefit from the big screen and fluid resizing of apps that the iPad Pro and similar tablets provide.

The separation in the middle that made the courier look awesome ten years ago, now feels like an unnecessary hardware separation between the two sides of the display.

discuss

smush|6 years ago

I'd buy a Courier as shown in that video right now, and all it is is a OneNote appliance.

I love the idea of being able to write new form-factor-sensitive apps as needed for a tiled window manager that resizes to accomodate a keyboard, or a ZUI on one screen, CLI on the other, or the traditional browser in one screen, terminal and VS in the other.

IFF they don't lock this down so much with Windows Lite/Windows 10 X (apparently 10 is now glued to the word Windows no matter what), Centaurus / Surface Neo has the potential to be an excellent device.

Edit: and am I glad it wasn't cancelled, not sure if I want to handle another Booklet PC being cancelled on me after getting excited about it.

simonh|6 years ago

It seems like the Nintendo DS worked because every single piece of software for it was written to use both screens effectively. With this, I can't imagine there will be hardly any software ever written for it specifically to use two screens, except maybe some first party stuff at launch.

I'm also worried about use on the go. When you're holding it in your hands, a folding device is a pain to use. If there was some reason you couldn't have a single large screen maybe ok, but as you say this is a solved problem.

olyjohn|6 years ago

YUP. This will end up like all the other Surfaces of the past... It will just get used like a regular laptop, docked to external peripherals 99% of the time. It will run Word, Outlook and Edge, and be locked down so the user can't do anything new or interesting with it. I doubt that the majority of Microsoft's own applications will even be optimized for this configuration.