Windows 8 Consumer Preview Highlights Metro Evolution

To enable "PCs without compromise," Microsoft today announced the shipment of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. It demonstrated how the operating system has changed since the developer preview was officially released at the Build conference last September.

I had been skeptical about how well this would work on traditional desktops and notebooks but the new build does seem to address many of these issues. I'll have to wait to try it in order to really judge, however.

Steven Sinofsky, president of the company's Windows and Windows Live division, said that the operating system is ready for consumer preview in five languages now at preview.windows.com. (He did note that the applications were mostly in earlier versions than the operating system.) Visual Studio 11 beta is also available now, and the company will share more information about the enterprise versions at the upcoming CeBit show.

Sinofsky said that as consumers, we face too many choices: consumption or production, performance or battery life, tablet or laptop, touch interface or keyboard and mouse. With Windows 8, he said, Microsoft wants to unite the hardware, OS capabilities, user interface, and applications so they work similarly across mobiles phones, tablets, and laptops, letting the OS scale to meet customers' needs.

The operating system has gone through significant changes since the developer preview, Sinofsky said, and Microsoft made more than 100,000 code changes. This is a "generation change" for Windows, Sinofsky said, representing nothing short of a bold re-imagination of Windows from the chipset to the interface. Microsoft started working on it before Windows 7 shipped.

Microsoft has rethought the user interface. It no longer has to label a Start menu but must enable users to see activities at a glance, make the apps work together, and use cloud connections. Users shouldn't have to pick one app over another, but should be able to have them work together. Cloud connections are also crucial, Sinofsky said. This is all tied together via the Metro interface.

Julie Larson-Green, corporate vice president for Windows Program Management, showed off the basic features of the OS on a tablet and emphasized how the OS is designed to operate using thumbs on a tablet.   

She started with a personalized lock screen, which displayed the time and battery life. She then touted the new tile-based Start Menu, which is designed for an environment where users have many more applications. One big change here from the developer version seems to be new ways of zooming out to see all applications and move applications around more easily.

Larson-Green showed the Metro version of Internet Explorer, "flicking" among tabs. The operating system will come with a new Xbox Live tile, similar to that on Xbox and Windows Phone, as well as music and video stores. (She couldn't log on to the Xbox Live, perhaps due to the Internet connection.)

Larson-Green showed a new instant messaging client and explained that Metro applications can work side-by-side. Setting that up did look faster than on the developer version. Applications can also automatically share via the "charms" on the side of the screen.

But a bigger question has always been how well it will work on a more traditional PC, with keyboard and mouse. Antoine Leblond, corporate vice president of Windows Web Services, demonstrated Windows 8 on a Lenovo U300 S Ultrabook, which uses a keyboard and mouse. 

Leblond explained that fingers are better for gestures, but mice are more precise. So, he explained that you move the mouse to the lower left to pull up the Start menu.

The mouse and keyboard work to rearrange the Start screen, either by moving individual tiles or groups. To move among apps, users can hold the mouse in the upper left hand corner and then pull down to see thumbnails of all the loaded applications. Users can also still hit the Windows key and type the name of the application.

Leblond ran the Kindle app, a financial application, and the USA Todayapp and he shared a USA Today article to WordPress, even though the two applications don't know about each other.

"Windows 8 is an even better Windows than Windows 7," Leblond said. All the applications and the desktop we are all familiar with work, and often work better.  

Leblond revealed a new UI for copying files. 

The desktop works like a Metro application, so users can see their running desktop applications in the same way. Here, it's shown side-by-side with a Metro application.

Larson-Green showed the new OS on a desktop with a touch screen, as well as a keyboard and mouse. All of the same commands work that way.

Using a Microsoft ID to sign in, users can have their preferences and defaults follow them from one system to another. She accessed  Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud data repository and showed that any application can pull up content directly from Skydrive or any other application that stores content. An integrated search command works with every application that you have installed.

Users can use the Windows Store to find fun apps and during the consumer preview period, all of the applications will be free, Leblond said. 

Sinofsky also announced the winners of the Windows 8 app contest, which seems to include a portfolio application, weather, games, and more. The winning applications will ship with the operating system.

The presentation then turned to hardware. Windows is designed to work on a wide range of systems, Sinofsky explained, from Windows on ARM tablets to traditional notebooks, to multi-monitor desktops used in large enterprises.

In a demonstration, Michael Angiulo, corporate vice president for Windows Planning and Ecosystem, showed off a Windows on ARM reference design tablet based on Nvidia's Tegra 3. Sinofsky and Angiulo also exhibited a variety of machines, including reference designs for tablets based on Qualcomm Snapdragon and TI OMAP processors, as well as Intel's upcoming Clover Trail Atom platform.

The OS now has a new range of class drivers that allow printers, keyboards, and such to work across all the devices. Windows on ARM will come with full versions of the core Microsoft Office applications.  

To make Windows 8 work on "phone processors," Angiulo said the OS had to be written to use less CPU, less memory, and less disk but still runs all of the features (except the desktop) as the x86 version. On the Atom tablet, as well as on traditional x86 notebooks, users have access to all of the traditional desktop Windows applications. On all of these machines, Windows supports "connected standby."

Ultrabooks can now boot faster (in about 8 seconds on an Acer machine, as Angiulo demonstrated) and UEFI will also secure boot, as well. Ultrabooks can sleep and resume quickly and applications better suspend when they aren't actually running; it also switches more smoothly between mobile broadband and Wi-Fi connections. Angiulo presented Ultrabooks from Toshiba, Acer, HP, Samsung, and Dell, as well as the Lenovo Yoga hybrid. Users will see new form factors, such as attaching keyboards to tablets, Sinofsky added.

Touch screens will change desktops and thus people's work environments, Sinofsky said, comparing this innovation to the introduction of the mouse 30 years ago. Although desktops will work well with keyboards and mouse, "you're going to want every PC to be touchable," he said. He emphasized, however, that this is "and, not or," meaning that users will continue to want a keyboard and mouse on a desktop.

The range of PCs Microsoft showed was impressive, moving from a tiny dual core AMD-based PC (that appeared to be the size of a fist) to an 82-in touch screen PC mounted on the wall.

Other demos included an exterior speaker connected via NFC; adding arbitrary drives to a storage pool in a way that looks like a single large drive, but with features such as RAID for redundancy; and a dual AMD Radeon 7970 card rendering at 60 frames per second. Most impressively, this demo ran Windows 8 off a USB key using the "Windows to Go" feature.

All in all, Windows 8 looks pretty impressive. It will face a lot of competition from iPads, Android tablets,  desktops and notebooks running OS X, and particularly from people who just are comfortable with Windows 7. I'm interested to see if it will be as smooth on the next generation of tablets as the iPad and how well it really works on more traditional desktops.

-Michael J.Miller [pc mag].