With today’s release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft is finally ready for the public to pass judgment on its most important software release in nearly two decades. Here’s what to expect.
- Windows 8 Consumer Preview
A modern computing device must do certain things, right out of the box. It must connect you to the web and to social networks. It must enable communications with your friends and family and co-workers. It must play music and video. It must provide a framework for extending its capabilities with apps that are easy to discover and install.
Those capabilities require a blend of hardware, software, and services that collectively add up to anexperience, which is much more than a list of features or a page of specs or a collection of screenshots.
Microsoft has been talking about experience for a long time. (The XP brand, introduced in 2001, came from the word eXPerience.) But it has taken a full decade for the company to turn its talk into something real. Windows 8 is the first operating system that Microsoft has consciously designed to work in harmony with hardware, apps, and services to deliver that consistent experience.
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Although you won’t see the word beta in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, that’s exactly what it is. It’s too early to run benchmarks or pass final judgment on a product, but this milestone is solidly built and feature-complete. It’s a good time to assess Microsoft’s progress with what is arguably its most consequential product release in nearly two decades.
I’ve been running Windows 8 Build 8250 for about a week on a Samsung tablet identical to the one developers received at Microsoft’s BUILD conference last September. (The hardware and preinstalled software were provided on a loan from Microsoft. The equipment will be returned before the final release of Windows 8 is available to the public.)
The Samsung slate is a well-built tablet that shows off Windows 8’s touch capabilities impressively. My review unit also included a docking station, which made it possible for me to connect to a 24-inch monitor, attach a keyboard and mouse, and evaluate this release the way most people are likely to use it in the near future: on a conventional PC, without touch capabilities.
If you dabbled with the Developer Preview edition of Windows 8, released nearly six months ago, you experienced bits and pieces of what Windows 8 would eventually become. But that incomplete release lacked the polish—not to mention the apps—that would have made it suitable for sustained use by nondevelopers.
With today’s unveiling of the Consumer Preview, the picture becomes considerably clearer. Microsoft says they’ve made “more than 100,000 changes” since the Developer Preview release, and it shows. It’s still a work in progress, but there’s no question that this release is ready for enthusiasts, early adopters, and especially skeptics to evaluate critically.
Dozens of small changes (and a few large ones) address complaints about the Start and search screens. You can manage groups of icons more easily (and optionally assign names to those groups) using the semantic zoom feature. (For an overview of what’s new and changed, see “A closer look at the Windows 8 Start screen,”)
There’s considerably more polish in the keyboard/mouse interface than was evident in the Developer Preview. It took me a day or two to adjust to a handful of new navigation techniques. With that brief period of adaptation out of the way, though, I find that many tasks are indeed faster and easier than in Windows 7.
On the Windows 8 desktop, the most obvious change is the absence of the Start button in the lower left corner. It’s not gone, though. If you move the mouse to the top or bottom corner on the right side of the display, you’ll see the Windows 8 Start icon in the center of the Charms bar shown below. (In fact, all four corners play a crucial role in using a mouse with Windows 8, as I explain in “How Windows 8 works,” later in this review.)
(By the way, there are at least three visual puns hidden in that default background. For details, check out the comprehensive screenshot gallery I’ve put together, which digs deeper into the bits and pieces of Windows 8.)
The Developer Preview included a motley collection of demo apps that had literally been built by student interns working at Microsoft over the summer. In the Consumer Preview, those apps are gone, replaced by a much more useful suite of 18 Metro style apps. Mail, Calendar, and Messaging are there, as are the media apps that were missing from the developer preview: Music, Video, and Photos. You’ll find connections to services from Microsoft (Hotmail, Skydrive, Xbox Live) and third parties (Gmail, Facebook, Flickr). I’ve got more details in a screenshot gallery that lists all 18 apps.)
Third-party Metro style apps will also be available via the Windows Store, which is scheduled to open when the Consumer Preview bits are made available to the public. I didn’t have early access to those apps.
A week is just enough time to scratch the surface of something as detailed, complex, and still incomplete as Windows 8. I fully expect a nontrivial number of Windows users to absolutely hate this radical reimagining of a product that wipes out a decade’s worth of muscle memory. The big question is whether the general public will come to a different conclusion after they experience it for themselves.
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