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Comment by jamesgeck0 | Hacker News Reader

The courier would have had a stylus, handwriting recognition, and a really nice screen. You'd have been able to cut and paste text and images by drawing circles around them and swiping them into a clipboard-bucket-thing on the other screen.

I don't know how well it would have worked in the final product, but it looked pretty snazzy in the demo videos. :-)

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One of the primary reasons I like computers is that I don't have to write by hand anymore. I don't think I'm alone.

I think the intention was for people who needed to draw things, like architects, electrical/mechanical engineers, artists. I nearly die over the fact that there is no awesome tablet that explicitly supports styluses and uses them in some new awesome creative way. It would really take away the barrier of taking notes in class with a tablet efficiently. (Even though I still plan on getting a tablet to do such things).

Most of the time. But years of high school and college trained me to take notes with my hand. Trying to focus on what people are saying and use a keyboard just feels too hard.

And yet I still don't want to give up all the advantages of electronic (vs paper) notes. I'd run to get a tablet with a really, really good stylus (I had high hopes for the HTC Flyer, but... maybe a future ICS tablet will get it right).

I’m not sure what handwriting recognition gets you. I don’t know if you noticed but handwriting is slow. Much, much, much slower than any touch keyboard, especially a huge one like on the iPad.

I really don't know why tablets don't have shorthand recognition.

Shorthand is fast.

That would be a niche feature. I doubt many people can write shorthand.

I wonder if more people would learn shorthand if the devices could make it an input technique competitive with touch typing?

Handwriting recognition lets you jot down notes on a large diagram without stopping to switch contexts and find some sort of keyboard input mechanism.

The courier was designed for people who are spending most of their time drawing, and don't need the overhead of dealing with a keyboard. I've seen some similar Windows 7 devices floating around, and I'd be interested to try them out.

This obviously isn't marketed at coders, and it sounds pretty useful for some heavy-duty drawing tasks.

That’s useful.

It doesn’t make the Courier any more a creation device than the iPad, though. That’s just absurd. The iPad is (also) for creation, the Courier would have been (also) for creation.

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