Wow, I haven’t written a post in three days, possibly a record (if you ignore the 18 years between my birth and my first post).
The reason for this sudden quietness is three-fold, the first and foremost being that I am preparing for my university departure. I drove up to Reading yesterday to, as Pinkie Brown might put it, case the joint. I went up to Reading Services on the M4 to meet my sister, who was driving up to Bristol (where she attends university), so she could check I knew where to go and what to do and then I carried on into the centre of Reading. I found the halls of residence where I’m living and went up to the University but had to rely on my satnav to do all the fine details when moving around the city. Also, I’m sorting out the last bits of paperwork and thinking about packing. The second reason is simply that nothing particularly striking, at least in my opinion (which you clearly take into account or else why read this blog), has happened in the tech world. The third reason is that I’m still working through the same three books as my last post while trying to squeeze in time to read around the rest of my wheelings and dealings.
Anyway, there are ever more persistent rumours of a Microsoft tablet PC (new rumours out this morning suggest that it will be called the ‘Courier’ that will use parts of, and probably sync with, Microsoft’s upcoming Surface project, in which touchscreens and a touch-based OS is to be placed on tables, supposedly mainly for use in cafés and public places. I keep hearing people insist that this is a pre-emptive strike for the perpetually rumoured but never seen Apple tablet that is supposedly coming up.
Gizmodo have, as ever, reported the development of such a product as genuine, despite having no pictures of a real prototype. However, reportedly Microsoft is saying that this isn’t a tablet (which it is) but instead it is a ‘booklet’ (which it isn’t) possibly as a way to dispel (badly I might add) the claim that this is simply a copycat idea of an Apple product that doesn’t exist by vapourware fanboys. Gizmodo are also have a virtual tour of how the interface would look and how it’s used, adding that this device is multi-touch, has a built in webcam.
This doesn’t seem guine to me, it seems to me that rather than chase after the vapourware of an Apple tablet computer that’s been rumoured for so long that it’s not anything that people take seriously anymore and that we probably won’t ever see, like Duke Nukem Forever, so I don’t think that Microsoft would NOW decide to start developing (though it hasn’t been announced yet) such a comprehensive list of features and functions or designs to compete with something that we haven’t seen yet. Microsoft were the first computer company to bust into smartphones operating systems, and try as they might they were beaten, indeed flummoxed, by Apple’s iPhone OS. There is no way that they would put together, even conceptually, a device to compete with an Apple device until they can see exactly what they do well and badly and adjust their device to suit.
It’s also worth mentioning that this may not remain a wordpress blog for long, at least in the sense that it won’t remain matgreenfield.wordpress.com, I have just bought both matgreenfield.com and matgreenfield.co.uk and will hopefully have the new blog set up as soon as possible. It’s going to be exactly the same stuff but with my own designs and with the ability to monetize it. This may or may not appear in the next few days, we’ll see…..