The latest iteration of Windows is getting closer and closer to release, in what is sure to be a marquee moment for the technology industry. We go hands on with the latest version of the consumer preview and let you know what to expect when Windows 8 makes it to the shelves. Look out for the follow up section to this on Friday!
Not 2 weeks ago, Microsoft announced in Barcelona that they would be readying a consumer preview of Windows 8 for the public at large to download. First developers and people in the know got a look, and now it’s time for the rest of us to take a look.
The key focus when developing Windows 8 has been to create an operating system that can simultaneously serve touch/tablet and desktop users. Enter Windows Metro. On first view Metro looks like a confusing array of bright neon colours and rectangles. But, upon further inspection, one can see that this in fact constitutes the new start menu for Windows 8.
Metro is a starting point for everything on your PC, just as the start menu has always been. Users can natively do basic tasks such as interacting with multimedia, messaging and photos as well as access apps. Things start to get a little more complex from here. There are two different types of apps – Windows apps and Metro apps. Metro apps are essentially slightly more advanced widgets and open within the Metro interface whereas Windows apps are traditional applications, which will open as per other iterations of Windows. In our next instalment, we go into more depth about what to expect from both of these.
What about the rest of Windows? Thus far, there’s very little that will be noticeably different to end-users. Most of it feels like Windows 7 with a slight facelift. All of the applications that I tested ran without issue which was a definite positive. Parting thoughts – Windows 8 is smooth. It stands to be a definite step up for Microsoft in the tablet world, whilst more of an update for desktop computing. It’s still early days however, and it’s going to be interesting keeping up with what Microsoft throws out to surprise us before the anticipated 2012/13 release.
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