It was a sad day when we learned that Microsoft was discontinuing its work on the Courier, a dual-display tablet that had tech fans buzzing. According to a report on Wednesday from DigiTimes, however, the company is still hard at work on a tablet. The Redmond-based software company is said to be cooperating with Texas Instruments and multiple Taiwan-based manufacturers in an attempt to push a Microsoft-branded Windows 8 tablet out to market by the end of 2012. Outside of the Xbox gaming console, Microsoft has not had much luck with consumer hardware in recent years. The company’s line of Zune media players were never widely adopted and its KIN line of messaging phones were cancelled shortly after their release before later returning to Verizon shelves with barely any fanfare. DigiTimes’ sources suggest those failures won’t stop the company from trying, however, and the buzzing tablet space is an obvious next point of attack.
