Kindle Who? iPad What?

So I’d written a couple blog posts about the iPad announcement and my reactions. Over a month later, I still have little to no interest in the iPad, despite my being a huge Apple fanboy otherwise.

But I saw something the other day that made me change my mind. No, not about the iPad, or even the Kindle. Something that made me want to buy something completely different.

And it’s from Microsoft.

Say hello to the “Courier”:

When I first glanced at this article, I rolled my eyes and thought here we go again. But then I looked at the screen shots and (more importantly) the videos. Before I was even halfway through the first video, I decided I MUST HAVE THIS.

It’s essentially a digital journal. It’s got two touch screens side-by-side like a book, and input is handled via a pen stylus. Text is written by hand and you can clip photos from the web or its built-in camera. It even has a basic paint feature, although it remains to be seen if it sports pressure-sensitive drawing. That would be the icing on the cake.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized, this is a highly evolved version of Evernote in physical form. Everything you enter syncs to a companion website. It also has a full web browser and, get this, is also an e-book reader! I have to tell you, if even half the functionality from the video makes it into a version 1.0 product, it’s going to be huge, and I think the iPad has serious cause for alarm.

Availability is vaguely announced as Q3/Q4 2010 and there’s still no price. To me, it doesn’t matter. That video is like digital sex. Maybe it just speaks to me as a “creative” type, but I’ve not shown this to anyone yet that didn’t think it was the most badass thing ever.

All I can say is, don’t disappoint me on this, Microsoft. I’ll be following this one for sure.

Tags: courier, evernote, ipad, kindle, microsoft