Microsoft's latest operating system is now readyforthe world to explore firsthand. Before you decide whether or not to download it, check out our first impressions. BY MICHAEL MUCHMORE he tablet- and touch-centric operating system would seem to be a hard sell to users of good old PCs, but Microsoft claims the re' s no need for the "tyranny of or"-Windows 8 can serve both ta blet and desktop us ers without compromises. Th at' s the party line, anyway. We'll get a better idea of wh ether the general public agrees after this Consumer Preview is more widely adopted. Microsoft's mission with Windows 8, whose final version is expected by the end of the year, is not an easy one to pull off: Crea ting an opera ting system that works equally weil on both a touch tablet and a traditional PC with keyboard and mouse. Apple, by contrast, has expanded iOS for tablet duty, as weil. Microsoft' s take is that Windows 8 will deliver a fullpower OS, without compromises, for both types of users.HOW IT COMPARES TO OS X LION, CHROME In sorne ways, Windows 8 resembles OS X Lionand Mountain Lion- more than iOS, with swiping to switch between apps and a fully accessible filefolder system. Where Apple has migrated features from its mobile OS to its desktop OS, Microsoft has created a hybrid that should be comfortable in bath settings, and though Windows 8 lacks the final polish and sturdiness of iOS, Microsoft has made admirable progress toward that goal. An even doser comparison might be Google's Chrome OS (remember that?), except that, with Windows 8, you don'tjust get the Web-app-like Metro apps, but also the full body of Windows apps, too. And unlike Chrome OS, on which everything lives in the cloud, Windows 8 gives you both the cloud and powerfullocal apps and accessible storage. For this hands-on report, I used the same Samsung ta blet that was handed out at Microsoft's Build Conference last September. My first quick impressions are that it does an even better job of smoothing out the transition between the Windows Phone-like Metro tile interface and the more traditional Windows desktop mode that will be more familiar to longtime Windows users. It also makes even smarter use of touch gestures. SETTING UP, SIGNING IN When you first run the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, you need togo through a four-step setup-Personalize, Wireless setup, Settings, and Sign in. Each step is very simple and uncluttered. Next cornes signing in. In order to download apps from the Windows Store and take advantage of the SkyDrive cloud service that stores files and photos and syncs your settings
" WhereApple bas migrated features fromits mobileOSto itsdesktop OS, Microsoft hascreated a hybrid that shouldbe comfortable inboth settings. "
with other machines, you need to sign in with a Windows Live ID. After this, you finally get your first look at the Windows 8 Metro start screen! This gridlike display ofbrightly colored rectangular "live tiles" is where you launch any apps, control settings, and enter the more traditional Windows desktop. After a shutdown and restart, you'll see the lock screen ( which will be familiar to any smart phone user). On this you can see battery charge, Wi-Fi signal strength, and notifications for e-mail and any other apps you've allowed. A new type of notification for Consumer Preview is the "toast" that pops in from the upper right if, for example, you have an incoming instant message. The new preview also adds the ability to boot from a USB stick or other external deviee or dise. PICTURE PASSWORD There's a new way to get past this informative lock screen-the picture password. I was a little surprised that the setup process didn't allow me create a picture password, since Microsoft has talked about this feature a lot in conferences and on the Building Windows 8 blog. It's a elever feature that saves you from having to type on your touch screen. To crea te a picture password, Tap Settings, then More PC Setting, and choose Users. From here, you can not only create the picture password, but also switch to a local account (without SkyDrive benefits), change your regular password, or crea te a 4-digit PIN that lets you quickly start, muchas you can with iOS deviees. The first step is to actually choose your picture. Something with several objects and shapes is best. Y ou then sim ply draw any combination of three circles, taps, or lines. Y ou then repeat the pattern to confirm it, and, voilà. The first time I tried to sign in, my "password" wasn't accepted, but it soon became second nature. The feature shows how deeply Microsoft has been thinking about touch interfaces, letting you log in with gestures rather than character entry. And for those worried about security, Microsoft has done the analysis that shows there are over a billion possible gesture combinations for this type of password. NEW SWIPE GESTURES A key Windows 8 concept for touch input is that the si des of the screen are for Windows, while the top and bottom are for the a pp you're running. Swipe in from the right side, and you'll see the Windows 8 "Charms" -or icons that give access to basic OS functions, including Search, Share, Start, Deviees, and Settings. These Charms have been redesigned in the Consumer Preview, with the new Windows logo showing up for the Start choice and the rest getting new polish. Using the mouse, you get to the charms by moving the pointer to the upper-right corner ofyour screen. Swiping from the left edge of the screen switches you to a previous running app, but also lets you pin a sidebar showing the apps content (formattedjust for this space). New in Community Preview is the option to easily swap the large and small views by swiping down from the top and moving the resulting smaller window. Swiping up from the bottom or down from the top opens an app's own menu. Windows 8 offers an advantage over both iOS and Lion-the ability to use a swipe gesture to give a peek at another running app. In iOS, you have to completely switch out of one a pp to take a look at another. The gesture of swiping to show a sidebar populated with a second app works for full-blown Windows desktop apps, too. Semantic zoom is a helpful innovation. By using a pinch gesture on the Start screen, the a pp icons shrink, but not in the simple way you zoom out on a photo; the tiles resize to remain readable, and your groups of tiles stay together, ali visible on one screen. This lets you do things like moving an app's tile from the first to the last page without a lot of scrolling. ENTERING TEXTWITH TOUCH Windows B's on-screen keyboard springs up from the bottom of the screen whenever you touch a text-entry field. It's a very versatile tool, more so than other mobile operating systems' equivalent. Y ou can either use a full keyboard, a split keyboard suited to thumb entry, or stylus a pinch gesture on the Start screen, the a pp icons shrink, but not in the simple way you zoom out on a photo; the tiles resize to remain readable, and your groups of tiles stay together, ali visible on one screen. This lets you do things like moving an app's tile from the first to the last page without a lot of scrolling. ENTERING TEXTWITH TOUCH Windows B's on-screen keyboard springs up from the bottom of the screen whenever you touch a text-entry field. It's a very versatile tool, more so than other mobile operating systems' equivalent. Y ou can either use a full keyboard, a split keyboard suited to thumb entry, or stylus touch-screen keyboard. Now let's look at what you can do with an actual keyboard and meuse. NEW KEYBOARD AND MOUSE FUNCTIONS Microsoft's philosophy for meuse interaction with the OS is that the corners are key. Previous versions of Windows' Start butten were in the lower-left corner, every app's X to close its win dow was in the top right corner, the most important menu item was at the top left, and the Aero Peek butten in Windows 7 is in the lowerright corner. An important improvement to using Windows 8 with a keyboard is that now you can scroll the Metro Start screen's tiles sim ply by nudging the mo use cursor against the right si de of the screen. With Developer Preview, you had to move the cursor dawn to the bottom edge of the screen and grab the scroll bar, or hit Ctrl-Right Arrow. Y ou can still scroll the Start til es with the meuse wheel, which is nice. Fans of keyboard shortcuts won't be disappointed: Windows 8 in eludes a ton of very useful shortcuts, many of which take advantage of the Windows key. Hitting this by itself at any time takes you back to the Metro Start screen, and hitting it again returns you to your running app. The venerable Alt-F4 now closes any kind of Windows 8 app (as does slowly swiping to the bottom of the screen). Of particular interest to the techjournalist is the new screen-capture feature, Windows Key+ PrtScn. A final very useful option is Ctrl-Shift-Esc, which opens the task manager. I'll do a separate article going into more depth on what you can do with keyboard shortcuts in Windows 8. NEWAPPS At the Build Conference launch of Windows 8 Developer Preview, the new operating system launched with a couple dozen Metro apps coded by college interns, in an effort to show how you don't need a PhD in computer science to write for the system. With the Consumer Preview, we get severa} new polished apps programmed by professionals. There are actually far fewer included apps this time, but the Windows Store's grand opening means even more choice. Since the store didn't go live un til February 29th, look for a separa te article detailing that soon, too. The Consumer Preview's included apps are limited to a dozen orso essentials-mail, photos, weather, finance, Maps, People (for social updates), Calendar, Video, Messaging, Photos, Music. Y ou also get a couple gamesgood old Solitaire and a pinball game. This last is connected to Xbox Live, which you're encouraged to get an account with, to sync your gaming on different deviees. I appreciated that the Photos a pp let me view pictures on Flickr, Facebook, and SkyDrive as weil as on the local deviee. Ali of the utilitarian apps are very dean and minimalist, but they still offer most of the features you want. The Mail a pp gave me no problems hooking in a Gmail account and composing messages with attachments. The messaging a pp let me connect through Facebook and Windows Live Messenger, but it's not an SMS replacement like Apple's iMessage, spellcorrection wasn't working, and there was no video chat. The People a pp did a nice job of aggregating my Facebook, Twitter, and Live feeds, but its use of space wasn't very efficient, with each tweet taking the full screen height. A lot of the quibbles are certainly things Microsoft will address before release. NEW FOR THE DESKTOP It's true: The beloved Start button is gone. Oris it? The Start button is still there in the lower-left corner; it just doesn't take up any screen spa ce until you move the mouse there. When you do so, you'll now see a thumbnail view of the Metro Start page- a good visual indicator of where you're going when you click. My only problem with this is that it behaves differently from most Web apps that use a similar interface techniqueinstead of letting you click anywhere on the " TheStart buttonis still there in thelowerleft corner; itjust doesn't takeupany screen space untilyou movethe mouse there. " thumbnail, you'll only be taken to the Start screen if you click with the mo use cursor all the way in the lower-left corner. Despite this detail, the thumbnail on-hover start button is another example of Microsoft's having made the transition between Desktop and Metro views smoother in the Consumer Preview. The Desktop workspace is for what Microsoft folks call "power users," even though it's what every Windows user has been using for the past 20 years. Windows Explorer's new File management tools, complete with rib bon, have been tweaked since the Developer Preview. Now you can hi de the rib bon (just as in Office 2010 ), and there are a bun ch of new file-moving and THE CLOUD CONNECTION SkyDrive is Microsoft's online storage service that offers anyone a free 25GB. The new OS makes SkyDrive cloud storage and synching service available to any Windows 8 a pp that wants to use it and that you allow to use it. In my test ta blet, the SkyDrive a pp itself got a small Start screen tile, and the app's own interface used pages of tiles. This makes sense for touch interface, but l' d like to be able to switch to a more concise list view-there wasn't even a semantic zoom view. But Windows 8's cloud capabilities go way beyond this simple SkyDrive Metro app, and, indeed, you can always hop onto the more powerful Web interface of SkyDrive. The system integrates messaging and sharing throughout, using whatever communication services you've enabled. As with Chrome OS, wh en you sign into any Windows 8 PC, you'll see ali your same personalization, settings, and even Metro apps. DEVICE MANAGEMENT The Deviees charm is accessible by swiping in from the right on a touch screen or moving the mouse cursor to the upper right corner. From here I only saw the multi-monitor setup choice, but heading to the Deviees section of PC Settings let me check for new hardware and connect Bluetooth mice, speakers, keyboards, and the like. It also lets you prevent deviee software from being downloaded wh en you're using a metered mobile connection. When I plugged a USB memory stick into the Windows 8 ta blet, a notification asked me to decide how to handle it, but my only option was to view files in the desktop mode- there was no Metro UI option for dealing with USB memory. I would like to have seen a new tile giving access to the USB memory, at any rate. INTERNETEXPLORER10 IE10 becomes a more integral part of the system with Windows 8, and it offers two guises: the fullscreen Metro view and the more familiar desktop verison. The former follows ali the Metro a pp behaviors. Instead of tabs, you drag down from the top of the screen (or up from the bottom) to reveal your open browser pages in thumbnails along the top. Upon this same gesture, along the bottom appear the standard browser address bar and icons for page reloading and pinning ( which adds the page to your Start screen). Y ou can also unpinch to zoom, and swiping a finger left or right moves you forward or backward in your browsing history. A double tap will also zoom in on the page. Like the iPad's Safari browser, the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 doesn't support Flash (or other plugins, for that matter), but should you encounter a page that uses those technologies, you can simply switch to the desktop version of IE. The modern replacement for Flash is HTMLs, and there's good news on that front with the IE10 that cornes with Windows 8 Consumer Preview. On the HTMLsTest.com site, which measures the number of HTMLs features, it gets a score of 314. This is up from 301 in the Developer Preview, and a mere 141 for IEg. Chrome, Firefox, and others have recently scored above 300, so it's niceto see the IE is finally in the mix. A wrench icon lets you search within the page or switch to the Desktop browser mode, which is indistinguishable from IEg. Ali these options also appear if you right-click your mo use button. A final helpful touch is the "Clean up tabs" option, which closes ali except your current page. In a very quick and dirty performance test, IE1o posted a 427ms Sunspider result on the 1.6GHx Core is tablet with 4GB RAM. This compares with 259ms on a Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz Windows 7 (32- bit) laptop with 3GB of DDR2 memory and 686 with Google Chrome on the same Samsung ta blet. SOME STABILITY ISSUES (AS EXPECTED) The build of Windows 8 I tested wasn't as final as what's available today for download, and I did run into minor glitches. At one point, the PC settings page stopped responding, instead drawing blue boxes around my choices. At one point I even got a shutdown message with a frowny-face emoticon. The Developer Preview I tested months ago didn't have any similar issues. When I tried to shut down and restart, the accessibility voice started announcing whatever I touched, without performing the action I wanted. And when I was configuring a wireless mouse, the screen switched to portrait orientation, though I was viewing landscape. And the screen would occasionally brighten to full intensity unprovoked. But this is why Microsoft released a preview-to get this kind offeedback and fix it before it goes on sale. A PARADIGM FOR THE FUTURE? I was initially dubious about Windows 8's split personality, but it is making more and more sense tome. For on-the-go Web browsing, Facebooking, emailing, and casual gaming, you've got the touch tablet interface. But you can then plug the same ta blet into a dock, turning it into a full-blown desktop PC, with keyboard, mouse, and even a larger external monitor. And you also have ali those Windows apps you've been using for years. l'rn sure l'rn not al one in that my primary work PC is a docked laptop with a large external monitor. The Windows 8 scenario just takes this a step further in portability. This is far from the end of the story for Windows 8. Now that the Consumer Preview installer software is available, we'll be testing on more machines and running benchmarks and other comparative performance tests. We'll also take deeper dives into the included apps, the Windows Store, and the best third-party apps. And we'll be keeping you informed about Windows 8 till its expected launch later this year. Microsoft is diving into the deep end with this one-size-fits-all tablet and desktop OS, and only time will tell whether it's a strategy that resonates as weil as the more bottom-up iPad system from Apple. And the contrast with Mac OS X Mountain Lion's approach is equally stark, with Apple keeping its desktop and mobile OSes completely "I was initially dubiol1S about Windows 8'ssplit personality, butitis makingmore and more sense tome. PC" separate, while increasing synergy and feature overlap between the two. Windows 8 introduces sorne really innovative touch-input options suited to thumb interactions, and it will benefit the desktop user as weil, with faster startup and better file management. So don't count Microsoft out: Windows 8 is evidence that the old tech company is qui te capable of bold moves and impressive innovation.
PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION 1 APRIL 2012
