Those with very long memories might have spotted a resemblance between the iPhone Duo and a prototype device seen way back in 2009, the Microsoft Courier.
Top comment by Leroy
Apple is great at taking concepts and ideas that didn't achieve wide success in their first incarnation and turning them into market place hits. iOS borrowed the swipe up controls and card view multitasking from the Palm webOS. Maybe it is the market share they have that translates into success, maybe it is the marketing team they have, maybe they add just a tiny bit that pushes it over the edge, but it seems to happen again and again with Apple
My headline is, of course, tongue-in-cheek: Microsoft never got any further than the prototype, and abandoned the project less than a year later. All the same, it is remarkable now to look back at it and see just how similar it is in terms of the integrated user-interface …
I said in my earlier piece that Apple has shown the world how to properly make a foldable smartphone, and that the clever integration between hardware and software is absolutely key to this.
One of the examples I gave was dragging part of a photo from one side of the screen to a separate app on the other, so it’s quite amusing to see Microsoft demonstrating a very similar capability in that 2009 concept video.
Microsoft did run with some of this type of capability with some of its Surface products, but it’s ironic that it took Apple to really match the level of integration the company originally had in mind. Check out the video below.
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