Microsoft’s Courier tablet with Windows 7 ?

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I say “verifiable” here, not in an official sense, but based on a new Courier video clip Gizmodo posted on September 29. Gizmodo’s new clip shows more details about the journaling model around which Courier’s user interface seems to revolve. From Gizmodo’s explanation:

“The (Courier) journal can actually be published online, and it’s shown here as able to be downloaded in three formats: a Courier file, Powerpoint or PDF. There’s also a library that looks a lot like Delicious Library, where things like subscriptions, notebooks and apps, are stored.”

That sure makes the Courier sound like it fits in with Microsoft’s uber-”three screens and a cloud” vision — via which devices, TVs and PCs all share common cloud-based services, storage, etc.

The Courier journaling metaphor isn’t so different from Microsoft’s OneNote note-taking app that is currently the showcase app for existing tablet PCs, my “connected” source said. He explained:

“The concept started as a software idea on how one would really build OneNote from scratch if you could for the Tablet form factor. That then morphed into building a tablet. If you look at the most successful pocket computer today – it is still the Franklin Covey Planning Products. So, the idea was how do you create a digital planner.”

My source also claimed that the operating system underneath Courier is — at least currently — Windows 7. (That’s not as crazy as it might seem, given that the OS underlying Microsoft’s Surface is Vista — and Windows 7 is touch-enabled.)

You can’t install Windows 7 apps on Courier, the source said, and that’s intentional.

The original Microsoft Tablets “failed because the applications were not tailored to a tablet form factor – that is, Word still had toolbars and menus and scollbars. So, a tablet needs to be like an iPhone – a UX that is specific for the form factor,” the source said.

My source said that Courier is an incubation project, meaning it’s further along than a Microsoft Research project, but still not in the commercialization pipeline. That said, he heard the  delivery goal is mid-2010. That seems pretty darn ambitious to me, but he also said Microsoft is currently leaning toward using the Xbox model — in other words, making the device itself, and not relying on its current Tablet partners — so that could speed things up a bit. [ZDNet]