At long last, details about a super-secret computer tablet have emerged, complete with pictures and even a video showing how it works.

But it’s not the long-awaited tablet that Apple Inc has been rumoured to be developing. This prototype reportedly comes from deep inside Apple’s archrival, Microsoft Corp, where its development has supposedly been so blanketed in secrecy that many high-ranking company executives didn’t know it existed.

If it’s real, that is. The device, code-named Courier, showed up on the popular technology blog Gizmodo.com under the headline “First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet”. Microsoft neither confirmed nor denied its existence. “We do not comment on unreleased products,” company spokesman Doug Free said.

He wouldn’t even say whether Microsoft was working on a tablet, which is a type of computer on which information can be input by touching fingers and/or a stylus directly to the screen.

“There are a broad range of products always under way,” Free said, none of which he would describe. If the tablet unearthed by Gizmodo is a fake, it’s certainly an elaborate one. And its features have sparked a lot of buzz in the personal computer world. “If it is a hoax, they should look into making it real,” said analyst Allan Krans of Technology Business Research Inc. “It looks like a cross between the Kindle, the iPhone and a tablet.”