Everything We Learned From Three Months With Windows 8

This week Microsoft launches its new Windows 8 operating system, a complete reinvention of the company?s defining product, and the Surface RT, the first of two hybrid tablet/laptop products designed and sold by the company itself. My experience with the Surface has been limited to a few minutes, so we?ll hold off on reviewing that until later in the week. However, I?ve been living with a pre-release version of Windows 8 on a Samsung Series 7 tablet as my primary computer for the past three months, and I?ve learned that anyone interested in upgrading should prepare for a big change.

The Overview

When a company faces an existential crisis, it can choose to fight the forces that threaten it, to ignore those forces, or to embrace them and change itself drastically. For Microsoft, the existential crisis is the movement away from traditional desktop computing. Arguably Microsoft ignored the trend for far too long, but recently the company embarked on a bold and risky dive into the technological future?and the success or failure of Windows 8 will determine the future relevance of Microsoft.

Windows 8 Pro (which goes on sale Friday at an introductory download price of $40 for anyone upgrading from Windows 7, Vista, or XP) is a massive overhaul for Microsoft, and a radical but necessary change of definition for computing itself. Rather than creating a separate tablet operating system, Microsoft has created Win 8 as both a tablet interface and a desktop OS at the same time.

In a world of too many Apple clones, Win 8 is unique in its design organization and movement. (Microsoft originally called its design language Metro, but has seemingly stepped away from that label. However, since we journalists haven?t been given another good word for it, I?ll continue to call it Metro in this review.) It?s purposefully flat, yet colorful and animated with information. With the tablet-first user interface, Microsoft has been even more ruthless than Apple and Google at shunning menus, tabs, and indicators of running apps, moving them to the off-screen periphery. Users can access core functions, known as charms, as well as menus and multitasking apps by dragging them in from the edges of the screen. Otherwise, they disappear.

Yet Microsoft is also aware that much of the world?s computing is still done in a chair at a desk with a mouse and keyboard, so it has built a complete desktop into the OS. Miraculously, all this has been done without expanding the software significantly?Windows 8 is roughly the same install size as Windows 7. The full version of Windows 8 for Intel-based X86 processors will run all Windows legacy software in a desktop mode that looks and feels very similar to Win 7.

Like Apple and Google, Microsoft also created an app store where users can download and purchase new software. Called the Windows Store, it should have around 3500 apps available to U.S. customers at launch, including Netflix, Amazon Kindle, and games such as Fruit Ninja and Cut the Rope. Unlike Apple, however, Microsoft isn?t being overly restrictive about the store. Software can be installed from any location, but the Windows Store will be the central distribution point for all apps.

Using Windows 8

Windows 8 feels like the first draft of a brilliant philosophy paper: Brimming with fresh and insightful ideas, delightful to use at times, yet often frustrating and difficult to grasp. That?s because Win 8 is a new philosophy of computing?a statement that tablet and desktop modalities can exist in the same OS, on the same machine.

Win 8 is also a new design statement?the information available to you is part of the look and feel of the user interface. For example, the icon (or "live tile") for your Photos app is one of your photos. All of your social networking is bundled into a People app, whose icon is a constantly changing collage of the faces of active posters to Facebook and Twitter. Live tiles is a carryover of one of the good ideas in Windows Phone, and it speaks to a uniformity of design that has been pushed through the Microsoft ecosystem, from phones to the Xbox to the company?s online software.

In practice, the software is speedy and responsive. On my Samsung tablet, the cold boot time for Win 8 is 10.6 seconds. The tiles respond instantly to finger flicks, swipes, and pinches. Metro programs are a study in deep immersion?the interface disappears and windows expand to the screen edge for minimal distraction.

I have heard detractors of Microsoft?s tablet UI (a group that includes my wife, a happy Windows Phone user who is no novice with live tiles) claim that the chromeless interface is difficult and confusing because it offers no cues to help users remember which sides of the screen from which to drag in different functions.

It is true that new users can find themselves lost in the UI, with no frame of reference for how to do something as simple as close an app. However, I remember some of the same criticisms from early users of Apple?s iOS devices. (Where are my files? Why is there no back button?) As with iOS, once you learn a few of the fundamentals, navigating Win 8?s Metro interface is relatively easy. Still, I suspect Microsoft?s customers won?t be as forgiving of this new paradigm as Apple?s customers were in 2007.

And those who do embrace the new UI will eventually discover some deeper flaws in Win 8. Specifically, the marriage of tablet and desktop isn?t as harmonious as the glossy interface would have you believe. For instance, when you set up Win 8 for use with a keyboard and mouse, your "swipe in" gestures transform into hot corners; you can accidentally bring up charms and other Metro menu items whenever you interact with anything at the corners of the screen. Also, you?ll need a Windows 7?style desktop if you want access to the file architecture or legacy software. But since Win 8 treats the desktop like an app, you can get an odd overlap that can quickly get confusing. You can have three applications running on the desktop, but when you use Win 8?s swipe-in feature to cycle through running apps, those desktop apps don?t appear until you open the desktop "app" itself. The result is a bit schizophrenic?the user must keep track of two types of multitasking.

A similar disconnect occurs with Settings. One of the Metro interface swipe-in charms is labeled Settings; tap it and you are presented with some quick settings and a submenu that allows you to "Change PC Settings." This brings up a host of user customization, networking, account, and privacy options, but it still doesn?t give you access to all of your computer?s settings. For those, you have to engage the Desktop app and bring up the traditional Control Panel?a relic from the early days of Windows. Because the settings are so spread out, troubleshooting or even some basic setup adjustments are a bigger pain than ever.

And then there is the unfortunate compromise of Windows RT. In a nod to the winds of change in the world of microprocessors, Microsoft vowed in 2011 that Windows 8 would work with both traditional X86 Intel processors as well as the low-cost ARM processors that dominate the mobile world. That has led to two completely different versions of Win 8: Windows 8 Pro (for Intel machines) and Windows RT (for ARM machines). Windows 8 Pro is the backwards-compatible, dual-mode OS that I?ve been describing thus far. Windows RT is a different animal.

RT will run the Windows Store apps designed for the Metro-style tablet interface, and it will come with a free version of Microsoft Office that will run on RT, but it won?t run all of the legacy software designed for earlier versions of Windows?rendering the desktop mode relatively useless. This isn?t necessarily Microsoft?s fault. Software written for Intel processors would have to be rewritten for ARM machines, so older software naturally gets left out of the picture for RT devices. But it feels like yet another hole in the promise of a truly unified operating system. What?s worse, RT will be the only version of Windows 8 initially available on Microsoft?s halo device, the Surface tablet. The Surface Pro, which uses an Intel processor and runs Win 8 Pro, won?t be available until January of 2013.

The good news is that most of these things are fixable as Microsoft refines this OS and as developers create and update their apps for Win 8. And unlike many previous operating system releases from Redmond, Windows 8 is remarkably stable and bug-free; I?ve been using a pre-release version for three months without a single system crash or freeze.

The Bottom Line

Microsoft got a lot of the big things right this time. Security has always been a problem for Windows, so now the company finally has built malware protection into the OS?there?s no need for a separate antivirus program. Win 8 also makes search and discovery simple and smart. When you get to the Start screen, just start typing what you are looking for and it comes up, or use the context-aware search charm to hop the same search term through multiple apps.

Still, I suspect most business and traditional computer users will stay away from Windows 8 at first. That?s because Windows 7 is already a remarkably stable and useful desktop interface?which is probably why Microsoft kept most of it intact within the desktop app in the new UI. Upgrading a conventional computer to Windows 8 brings with it a steep learning curve and little additional functionality.

But upgrading old computers to a new UI is not really the mission of Windows 8. It?s about enabling the computers of tomorrow?weird, hybrid things that are powerful, portable, and can change shape from a desk-friendly productivity machine that can handle complex software to a tablety thing that is great for reading, watching movies, and Internet surfing. These computers are already arriving, and not only in the form of Microsoft?s Surface devices. Witness the Lenovo Yoga, the Acer W510, the Sony Vaio Duo 11, and Dell XPS 12. These machines make even the sleek, thin, unibody designs of Apple?s MacBook line look like the technology of a previous era. And none of it would have been possible if Microsoft hadn?t taken this big, risky leap into the future.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/reviews/everything-we-learned-from-three-months-with-windows-8-14056779?src=rss

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