Microsoft not only thinks it can successfully walk the tightrope between these two usage cases, but that the result will be better and less limiting than any of the alternatives. I took an early version of the OS for a spin. The Windows 8 Developer Preview I tested was on an Intel-based Windows 8 developer preview PC. This is the first version of Windows 8 to be officially let outside of Microsoft employees’ hands, and as its name suggests, it’s far from fully baked. But it demonstrates a lot of improvements and new capabilities we can expect to see in Microsoft’s next big OSThe company is not saying anything official about when Windows 8 will ship, its price, or different editions in which it might be available. The general consensus, however, is that the OS will be launched in fall 2012, based on off-the-cuff executive statements and leaked schedules. And Windows 7 launched about a year after its 2008 PDC debut, so a fall 2012 timetable isn’t unreasonable. Till then, here’s a look at how the OS is shaping up at the moment. Note: this hands-on looks exclusively at the OS running on a tablet, as that's all I can get my hands on at the moment. Rest assured that I'll be installing and testing it on a regular PC as soon as I've got installer code from Microsoft. I've been briefed about the desktop code, so this hands on does refer occasionally to the desktop UI, but I haven't actually tested it yet.
Starting Up
The first thing you’ll probably notice is that Windows 8 starts up in a fraction of the time it takes any previous version of Windows. And that’s not just on tablets: at the BUILD show, Microsoft’s Gabe Aul demonstrated a high-end gaming PC starting up in a handful of seconds. The startup is so fast that the monitor couldn’t keep up to display the POST (power on self test) screen.
On the first startup of the Samsung Windows 8 PC provided for testing (a tablet that includes a dock and a Bluetooth keyboard) I had to give the computer a name, choose a Wi-Fi router, and configure settings. Defaults for this last step included recommended update and security options. It also defaulted to allowing programs to use my location, name, and user photo.
Next came a step very similar to one you get when setting up a Google Chrome notebook: You have to sign into or create a Windows Live account. This way your apps can tie in with Microsoft cloud services like SkyDrive storage, Hotmail, and any other connected services you’ve connected—Facebook and LinkedIn, for example. After logging in, the new Windows 8 tablet took a couple minutes to “prepare my PC.”
The next time I started up, I saw the lock screen image, and swiping up brought me to my login screen. Alternatively, an innovative new option in Windows 8 is to create a “picture password” in which you touch and swipe parts of an image to log in.
Metro-Style Apps
Microsoft insists that all Windows 7 apps will run in Windows 8, and that any machine that can run Windows 7 can run Windows 8. That said, the company seems most excited about the new species of app it calls Metro-style apps--referring to the Window Phone 7 Metro UI. These are touch-optimized, full-screen affairs that only show their menus and settings if you swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Swiping from the right side of the screen towards the middle brings up what the company calls “Charms”—icons for Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings.
You start Metro-style and non-Metro-style old-school desktop apps in the Start screen, itself part of the Windows Phone Metro UI. This shows tiles for each app on your system, and you can swipe through as many pages of apps as you want. This screen appears any time you hit the Windows button or choose Start from the Charms. Each tile not only shows the app name, but can show data relevant to that app, such as a recent photo, the weather, or a stock quote.
When you’re running more than one app, swiping a finger in from the left of the screen displays a smaller view of another running app, and if you leave your finger near the left side, it will resize to fill a quarter of the screen. App developers need to know how to display their apps in this and the three-quarters size that the other app will be allocated. A sample piano app had a clever approach: Just turn the keyboard on its side when it assumed the quarter page size. To switch completely to another app, I could just swipe right to the center of the screen.
The touch interface on my test machine was responsive and intuitive after an hour or so of use. The onscreen keyboard offers two layouts, one standard and the other with the keys split into two groups on each side of the screen for thumb input. In addition, the OS recognized handwritten input, with decent OCR that any app can take advantage of. It was easy to switch between input modes or dismiss them from a small keyboard icon.
