iPad's biggest rival? Microsoft's dead Courier • The Register

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Earlier this year, Microsoft decided to terminate the Courier, a dual-screened device that allowed for touch-based and pen-based inputs. In so doing, it just might have killed the only viable way to improve upon the iPad experience by facilitating the content creation experience in a way that the iPad resolutely fails to do.

Let's face it: the iPad is awesome if you just want to browse/watch/read content – movies, pictures, The Economist, whatever. But try to respond to any of that content, and you're largely going to be frustrated. Yes, you can get peripherals (e.g., a keyboard) that remove the pain, but they also remove the whole point of the iPad as a self-contained device.

iPad's biggest rival? Microsoft's dead Courier • The Register