The quest for the Holy Grail is generally regarded as a preoccupation of those of a religious or mystical bent. But in fact the community which suffers most from Holy Grail Syndrome is made up of geeks and early adopters who would never be seen within a mile of an altar.
For Christians, the Grail is the cup, plate or dish supposedly used by Jesus at the last Supper. For the computing community it is the Tablet, a slim, lightweight device which combines significant computing power with the convenience of a paper notebook. And sightings — or rumours — of the mythical device provoke the kind of delicious excitement so masterfully exploited by the novelist Dan Brown.
We had such a sighting last week, courtesy of the technology site Gizmodo which had descriptions, photographs and even a video of an intriguing manifestation of the Tablet concept.
It’s called the Courier. At first sight, it looks just like a notebook, but when you open it you find two hinged screens with elegant, touch-driven interfaces. When you want them to behave like paper, they are happy to oblige; you can scribble and sketch away to your heart’s content. But when you want them to behave like computers, then they do that too, enabling you to browse the web, compute with spreadsheets, manipulate images and pull in data from just about any application you can think of. Then when you’re finished, you close the “notebook”, put it in your bag and resume normal life.
What made the Gizmodo scoop even more intriguing was its claim that the Courier is not just a concept but a real device under development in the bowels of a big, powerful corporation. But the thing that really caused a stampede for the smelling salts was the news that this company is, er, Microsoft! This was definitely not in the mystical Tablet script. It was as if Vladimir Putin had suddenly announced that the Kremlin had been in possession of the Holy Grail all along, and indeed that Lenin used to take his breakfast on it most mornings.
The Keeper of the Tablet flame, you see, is supposed to be Apple, the home of everything cool in modern computing. There has been fevered speculation that the Tablet is what Steve Jobs and his designers would do next. One couldn’t go to any gathering of the faithful without people whispering that Apple had been secretly placing large orders for 7-inch (or 9-inch or 10-inch) screens.
The company’s patent applications were scrutinised with an intensity previously accorded only to the Dead Sea Scrolls for evidence of interface technology (touch-screen, gesture-based) that would confirm that the Tablet was nigh. Kids with a mastery of PhotoShop were taking images of the iPhone and iPod Touch and producing pictures of what the Apple device would look like. And so on.
So you can see why the revelation that the Evil Empire (aka Microsoft) might actually have some better ideas on the Tablet front has caused such discombobulation. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. And of course it might not: these are still early days. The Microsoft concept seems more ambitious, in a way, than what Apple is rumoured to have in the works, which will probably be an iPod Touch on steroids.
And even if the Courier and the Apple device do eventually go head-to-head, what will determine the outcome will be mundane things such as which operating systems they use. Because Microsoft’s co-founder, Bill Gates, was a strong believer in the Tablet-computing idea — and always used one himself — the company has been producing software for “Tablet PCs” for aeons. But these were very clunky devices, mostly laptops with reversible screens made by Taiwanese manufacturers. They were relatively expensive to buy and heavy to lug around. And they ran Windows, which meant that they were not exactly intuitive to use.
Since Apple made its own hardware and produced more intuitive software, the assumption therefore was that, in the end, the Tablet market would be Jobs’s for the taking. Maybe it will be. But this week’s revelations about the Microsoft Courier have planted the first, tentative, thoughts in the minds of detached observers that the quest for technology’s Holy Grail isn’t over yet. All we need is for Dan Brown to take up the story. – guardian.co.uk