I’ve been waiting for the perfect tablet. Be it Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad,or Apple’s mythical iPad/iTablet. But what’s this out of left field? News,pictures and videos have leaked about Microsoft’s Courier,and it looks amazing. The product you see here is supposedly a “late prototype”,and is being shown to outside agencies regarding design concepts. So here we have a real device,which is a booklet style tablet using two 7″multitouch displays that are geared towards drawing,flicking and even writing with a stylus or your fingers. The entire device looks stunning,with its clean single-button Apple-eqsue hinged display. There are little things like wireless and battery statuses on the rim of the screen and a camera on the back,and even rumors of a inductive charging pad,a-la Palm Touchstone which would be ridiculously cool. (Found on Gizmodo)

Barnes &Noble has come out of nowhere and taken the eBook Reader market and pulled an “Apple iPhone”on it. Sure there are plenty of great eBook readers on the market,with Amazon selling it’s Kindle and Kindle DX to great fame,Borders touting the Sony eReaders,and then iRex and Plastic Logic,who are sort of there. But with the “nook”Barnes and Noble has something really solid. As leaked earlier to Gizmodo,the reader is comprised of two screens,one eInk screen to read,and a smaller 3″multitouch screen across the bottom for everything else. You can easily control your reader,type on the virtual keyboard,user a CoverFlow-esque book browser,and control your music through a great capacitive display. What’s more,all of this retails at a price point lower than Amazon at just $259. Gizmodo has got a great hands-on with the reader,while CrunchGear has a nice little comparison of the four major eBook Readers on the market. But what’s really interesting is how well thought out the nook really is. For example,you can lend books you own to friends and family for a 2 week period (just like real books!). Not only that,but they (and you) can read those books wherever you want:the nook,iPhone,iPod Touch,Mac,PC,Blackberry,and (soon) Windows Mobile! The nook even remembers your place,notes,and highlights across all the different environments. The next “reading”feature is that you get to read one book free on the device each time you go to a Barnes &Noble store. You can even sample books on the reader to see if you like them before buying the whole book. Finally,it’s still got a great battery life at 10 days,3G and WiFi,and the bottom screen runs Android so there are plans for apps to be developed for it in the future,possibly better utilizing the built-in 2GB memory and SD card reader? Videos anyone? Overall,this looks great,solves a lot of issues people had with browsing the Kindle store through a eInk display,and I plain love it.

As predicted earlier,Apple has announced a new multi-touch Magic Mouse,which looks very sleek and very cool. It’s multi-touch abilities allow you to use a visually clean mouse to scroll,left and right click,switch tabs/pages,and even zoom in and out. They also announced a new Macbook,which retains some of the styling of the old one,but is now unibody,has a glass multi-touch trackpad,LED backlit,and a non-removable 7 hour battery. Finally,they announced new iMacs,which now come bundled with a wireless keyboard and the recently announced Magic Mouse. They are 16:9 ratio screens,and lose the square-shape of the old,and become more rectangular and take on the styling of Apple’s 23″LED display. All in all,some nice interesting stuff,which I am glad to see Apple is announcing here instead of at an event. Leaves hope for more interesting stuff for then.

Hey Apple! Way to go raining on Barnes &Nobles’parade by stirring up rumors of a product announcement tomorrow. Engadget is reporting that Apple is preparing to announce a bunch of new products (without sending any invitations to the press?.. weird),including “new iMacs and plastic MacBooks,revved Mac Minis (including one that runs OS X Server),a new multitouch “Magic Mouse”and some sort of multitouch desktop trackpad accessory.”We can only wait and see.