Windows 8 Beta out now (aka Consumer Preview)

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50. Windows 8: Sugar coating on Microsoft's hard-to-swallow tablet

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/02/win_8_consumer_technology_preview_review/

Preview review How do you bring legacy-encrusted Windows into the mobile era? Microsoft's solution is to take all that baggage and place it into a compartment labeled desktop, while reinventing the Windows user interface in a second compartment called Metro.

Metro is primary, and conceptually the old desktop is now an app in the Metro Start menu. You can think of Metro as loosely equivalent to Apple's iOS, whereas desktop is like OS X. A key difference is that in Windows 8 they are side by side.

The snag with this plan is that there are no Metro apps, aside from what comes bundled with Windows plus whatever Microsoft can persuade third parties to come up with in time for the launch later this year. A second issue is that touch screens are not the norm in the Windows world - hardly surprising given that the user interface of Windows 7 and earlier works so badly with fingertips - so most users will need new hardware in order to get Windows 8 running as designed.

I have been using Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a Samsung Series 7 slate since the launch of the beta on 29 February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The story overall is that on this third attempt (counting the Tablet PC as the first and the ill-fated Origami as the second) Microsoft has made an excellent tablet operating system.

The problem area is the combination and interaction between the old desktop and the new Metro-style platform. It is a complication, since most desktop apps still do not work well with touch alone - though we have yet to see how Microsoft will modify Office to work better in that respect - and if most Windows 8 machines end up saddled with add-on or built-in physical keyboard and pointing device, then they will not compete successfully with Apple's iPad or Android tablets on convenience or price.