Windows 8 for tablet hands on | Hacker News Reader

Windows 8 for tablet hands on

engadget.com

151 pointsmingyeow138 comments

As someone who worked for MSFT for so long, this bit really makes me happy - mostly since no one would have given this much odds of happening.

"With the introduction of OS X Lion, Apple gave us a glimpse at what a post-PC operating system might look like, and now Microsoft's gone and pushed that idea to the limit. If Cupertino's latest was a tease, than Windows 8 is full frontal. And we have to admit, we like what we see. "

This makes me really excited about the future of the 'desktop' ( => tablet). Microsoft has really nailed it in terms of user experience and performance. This is a good example of out innovating the competition and no other company is better suited to execute on this than Microsoft.

How do you know they nailed it in terms of performance? It's running on a Core i5, on which even Vista or Windows 7 runs well. We don't know how well it will run on Atom or ARM yet, which will be the "tablet optimized" chips, with higher battery life. The Core i5 will give 2 hours of battery life, especially in such a small package compared to a notebook.

They did show an ARM tablet as well. Besides by the time it is released, processors would have gotten even better.

Just see the keynote again. It actually uses less resources even today as compared to Windows 7 SP1.

What kind of battery life does Windows 7 SP1 get on tablets?

Don't know. A quick search brought up this page where the tablet gets a 7 for battery life. So I am guessing its ok.

http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/acer-iconia-tab-w500p/4505-3...

The $550 Acer Iconia W500 tablet (which comes with an attachable keyboard base) got 4:06 on a Cnet video playback battery drain test.

http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/acer-iconia-tab-w500p/4505-3...

Acer isn't exactly known for brilliant power engineering, so a better vendor could likely do better. But this also wasn't exactly a high-powered chip, either. So this is probably a plausible baseline for battery usage in Win 7.

They need to beat this by quite a bit in Win 8, or the tablets will be a tough sell.

Given that the iPad 2 gets 11 hours + in similar tests I don't think that's a tough sell, I think it's an impossible sell.

It's hard to relate to the excitement when the demo was chock-full of usability failure. How many times did the presenters struggle to register their gestures?

Someone will no doubt say "it's a developer release – we'll fix all that". My response to that is "Apple would never let that see the outside of a top-secret lab".

Also, am I the only person who thinks this is the polar opposite of "post-PC"? Desktop, start menu, right-click, etc. Maybe "touch PC" is more apt?

The presenter struggles because on the one hand he has a camera and the other he uses to swipe/touch.

I'm not suggesting the beta/dev preview version is without bugs, I believe you're reading too much into this.

I'd argue that's "presentation" failure. This is something that can be practiced so as to keep the focus on the product and not on the sloppiness due to lack of preparedness.

I'd argue that you can hand an iPad to your grandmother with severe arthritis or your toddler for the first time and they wouldn't have nearly as much trouble as the presenter in the video.

Why would you give your grandmother a prototype tablet that will never see a production release?

Why would you demo a prototype?

Gee, I don't know...maybe to give the millions of people who are interested in it an idea of what it might be like.

I might be confusing this video with the one on This Is My Next. I watched them both today.

You've got to wonder why Engadget can't invest in a tripod.

Apple also locks down the iPad to allow me to only do with it what they bless as appropriate.

The Apple model is just different. It's not "the right way" it's just "the apple way." High emphasis on developing in secret and only showing a locked-down finished product.

The fact they are releasing an OS a year before it hits shelves allows millions of developers to get a crack at building new apps.

Apple has also been shipping iPads for the past 17 months.

How interested are developers going to be in developing apps for a "maybe" platform when they can be developing for an installed base of 50-odd million iPads right now? What if this is a TouchPad? It doesn't seem like a good bet on the tablet side given the history.

Windows is a "maybe" platform? cmon...

One of the most attractive aspects of this to me is that I would not be developing just for a single device tablet OS. The applications will run across both tablets and desktops, and even a Microsoft "failed" Windows release is sure to see a massive uptake, especially as it will be the default OS on the vast majority of new computers.

As a tablet it's a maybe platform.

It's not as if Microsoft haven't tried to do this before and failed and they're taking a pretty different approach to what's working in the market at the moment.

It's possible that Win 8 can be a success on the desktop / laptop but fail as a tablet OS.

On the flipside, you're more likely to be developing for a lot of different versions of that OS, and – over time – you'll be developing for the lowest common denominator among them.

I just watched it, and more than anything, it seemed like it was slow. It seemed like he would swipe and nothing would happen, so he would swipe again, but it was actually just that the tablet was still processing stuff, so then it would eventually process both gestures. I think it would be quite normal for a developer release to be slow.

As far as your point about whether Apple would allow people to see this, well, that's just the Microsoft vs Apple marketing philosophy. Apple typically presents things that are very highly polished and nearly complete, whereas Microsoft says "Hey, check out this thing we're working on." All else being equal (I'm not saying it is, but if it were), they both seem like viable strategies.

Ditto. Hats off to Sinofsky for having the balls to push this through. Looks like an amazing release. I think he'll take over from Ballmer if Windows 8 is a success.

"With ... OS X Lion, Apple gave us a glimpse at what a post-PC operating system might look like"

Cheat Sheet for People Who Type Stuff for Engadget And Want To Be Good at Other Things Too:

iOS = post PC

Lion = first step in bridging PC and post-PC

Windows 8 = [strikethrough] your grandpa trying to rap [/strikethrough] second step to bridging PC and post-PC

I did not really understand what was meant by this. What is it about Windows 8 that is going to provide a better user experience? It certainly looks a bit different from other offerings, but I cannot discern what it is that people think is better.

Here's what I am excited about as a developer. Access to live service such as skydrive etc. Ability to release the same app on windows phone with minimal changes. =Touch enabled apps in a marketplace where Microsoft does not take a cut as opposed to the 30% cut that Apple takes. What's not to be excited about?

Why would a user care about these things?

Here's why: No cut to microsoft so cheaper prices of apps Familiar apps on both my phone and on my tablet/PC. No learning curve and settings/progress/data is shared Live services integration means my app roams with me to another PC when I buy one.

I am not sure we will see lower prices. Firstly, prices in Apple's store already are, let's say, 'affordable' for most apps.

Secondly, I think many apps are priced to what the market will bear, not to recoup costs plus some profit.

Thirdly, running that store will cost MS money. They are not a charity, so I guess they will try and recover the costs in some way. What that way is, I do not know, but I would guess it would be in adverts, non-free options with better exposure and/or in the cost of Windows.

It looks very streamlined and powerful - quite arguably more functional than today's iPad - but it's problematic that I don't see anything that makes anyones' life appreciably better. A Flipboard clone, mobile Internet, Twitter, Photos - nothing revolutionary. Really, really good, but nothing to give an iPad or Xoom owner buyer's remorse unless these are ridiculously cheap (I don't see how they'll have any price advantage over Apple or Googlerolla). Tablets will own this holiday season, which MS is missing out on, and remember that Windows 8 tablets will ship in the shadow of the iPad 3. Which, in turn, means that Android and iPad will remain the lead platform for large form touchscreen apps for the medium term future.

So: nice, but this doesn't stop their disruption.

When the build conference keynote's over, watch the recording. I think the killer feature will be having every device you pick up be tailored to you. When you hand it to your wife, it's tailored to her... just by signing in with a Windows Live ID instead of a local user/password. Your contacts, e-mail, calendar, photos, files, apps, desktop, bookmarks, individual app settings -- it will all be there on whatever device you pick up, whether it's a tablet, a phone, a desktop PC, your work PC. Windows 8 uses Microsoft's cloud to bust through firewalls on every end to connect every device you touch.

Kind of like iCloud?

Exactly, except this time, it'll be on the devices that have 85% market share.

Can you really imagine an average consumer being impressed that a tablet, identical in almost every way to the Android next to it, is running Windows? If not, it's really time to rethink Windows' dominant consumer marketshare.

No, but I can imagine an average consumer being happy that the device can run the copy of Home Landscape Architect 3D Pro Plus 2007 that they bought a few years back, work with their old Quicken data, and play that copy of Hoyle Card Games they have lying around.

People have accumulated stuff that runs on their PCs. Most people who buy iPads keep around their computer to do at least a few things, even if they don't use it very much. The sales pitch on a Win 8 tablet is that it docks to your desk, replaces your PC for everything, and you can still pick it up and carry it everywhere like an iPad.

That seems like a pretty fair sales pitch to me.

can run the copy of Home Landscape Architect 3D Pro Plus 2007

I'll be impressed if they can pull that off and still make it so I can carry it around like an iPad.

What I fear, however, is that they'll make this a hybrid that fails in both scenarios: not powerful enough to handle "3D PRo Plus 2007", yet too power hungry to let my wife watch 5 episodes of Desperate Housewives back to back.

Until I see production hardware, I'm on the fence.

They just showed a machine running core i5 with 4 GB ram. You think it won't run on a PC with that spec?

I think it will. Now show me a PC with that spec with the form factor and battery life - i.e. usage pattern - of an iPad. Your ARM tablet wont be able to run legacy software. Your x86 tablet wont have 12 hours of battery life and be thin and cool (in both senses of the word).

As a user it's a tradeoff. May be the x86 tablet won't have 12 hours battery life while still being as thin as the iPad but maybe I can trade a few hours of battery life or a few mm of thickness to get my legacy quicken app running on my tablet. What is cool is that as an end user I will have a choice to go either way.

Processors are getting better with each passing day. I don't think we are too far off from seeing x86 on a thin PC still getting a good battery life.

If they pull this off, it will be dream come true. All will then boil down to 2 device that you carry, your windows phone and a protable awesome tablet cum pc.

I'd be impressed if their copy of Home Landscape Architect 3D Pro Plus 2007 was even remotely usable with a touch interface it wasn't designed to support.

When you try to everything you end up doing nothing well. Zero percent of legacy Windows software was designed with touch in mind. The fact that Windows 8 will try and probably fail at letting people run this kind of software on a tablet shows me that the writing is on the wall.

When you try to everything you end up doing nothing well.

That's weird... PCs (Mac, Linux, Windows, etc...) have done this for the past 20+ years and a pretty good job of it.

Everyone loves to talk about the demise of the PC, but virtually everyone who has seen the ultrabooks has told me they want one. The only ones who don't are those that say, "Well I already have a MacBook Air". So, sure the Apple 5% may not continue down the PC path, but I think we're looking at a PC rennaisance. And in large part due to Apple.

>That seems like a pretty fair sales pitch to me.

Except we've already tried that. With pretty much every tablet that was ever made before the iPad. How many times are people going to go "but wait, mine is... a whole computer!" before they realize consumers don't want this? The reason the iPad won was because it wasn't a computer. It was a device, an appliance.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/08/20/forrester.sees... Estimated 14% of the US wants to buy an iPad

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/09/13/survey-shows-unpreced... see exhibit 4 - 85% of the tablet buyers intend to buy an iPad.

http://mashable.com/2011/09/12/apple-set-to-break-record-for...

the status quo may not stay the status quo for long... especially with people slowly admitting that, at least for moms and grandmas, tablets may be much more in line with their needs.

Paul Graham was even just on stage talking about how Microsoft likely doesn't see how bad its going to get for them...

PG stays in his wonderland where Microsoft is no longer relevant. He said that a few years ago already. Microsoft still made billions of dollars selling windows in those years.

Same is the case with the surveys above. Everybody wanted to buy an iphone until android came along...

The interesting thing is that consumer surveys still show more people want to buy iPhones. But they walk out of stores with considerably more Android phones than iPhones.

That's 85% market share of the legacy platform.

I think it is more than iCloud. it is making your profile, your personalization and your content roaming. In case of iCloud, it is only the content if i am not wrong.

MobileMe has been doing settings and contact and such for a while now. It's buggy, mind you, but all of that functionality is going to iCloud.

You buy a new iPhone, login to iCloud, and it pulls all your settings over, configures your mail client, calendar, installs your apps, and downloads your music. You add a contact on your phone, it goes to your MacBook and iPad, etc.

If you have multiple Macs, MobileMe will even sync your keychain, dock, dashboard widgets and preference settings.

The google ecosystem is headed the same way. Chrome + Android + Amazon MP3 gives me all that stuff anywhere I log in (including windows / mac / linux workstations). I assume Google Music will do the same, which would put all those services under one roof and one login.

They already have some of this in Win7, the ability to link an ID, etc.

That's my biggest complaint about the iPad: I can't fully share my ipad with my girlfriend since it is tied to my email accounts, contacts, calendar etc. It makes sense that a phone is tied to one person, but this iOS limitation is annoying -- especially when traveling.

Yup. The iPhone and iPad are intimately personal devices. For the iPhone this works 100%. For the iPad it's both a blessing and a curse.

If this really proved to be a differentiating feature, would it really take Apple more than a month or two to provide user switching? They already have it in OSX.

Isn't it too early for that? Given the number of developers working with Microsoft's ecosystem, I don't think it will be long until they have a market as big as Apple's or Google's when it's released.

I think that WP7 wasn't a hit because MS made terrible partnerships and became a second-class OS vendor to everyone but Nokia, but I belive that the tablets will give MS more independence, will bring other makers to the table, and it will change. They're just late to the party.

I'm going out on a limb and making an educated prediction - it might well be too early. Then again, there's so much time between now and W8's release that we almost need to assume major launches and platform breakthroughs from Apple and Google (hey, Google announced Intel compatibility during the Build keynote). So to predict how things will shake out, we have to be a harsh on Windows 8 - it won't look any better next spring next to the iPad 3 and Android 4.0.

It's really weird for anyone that's followed technology for more than a decade, but Microsoft computers will have almost no special appeal to the average consumer. I don't think that Best Buy will have a special "Windows 8 Tablet" section like they do now for desktops and laptops - they'll be mixed in a sea of Android and Blackberry tablets (much like WP7 Phones at any phone store). Why not?

Windows 8 is in real danger of being second class in the consumer space. The lead development device is a Samsung, for example, but how much more profit would Sammy get if they made the same hardware with Android? Are the hurdles really great for Acer, Asus, Samsung, Sony or Lenovo (all Android vendors!) to put Android in any hardware that's running Windows 8?

It can run Visual Studio (more useful with a USB or bluetooth keyboard), not just a Flipboard clone, mobile Internet, Twitter or Photos.

You can even hook up a second monitor to it.

A $700 development tool is not the killer app I was looking for.

Any tablet can already create documents and spreadsheets, surf the internet, check e-mail and calendars, access social networks, edit movies, Skype... Everything that %95 of the population needs. People that need higher caliber tools (developers, creative professionals) can afford another system.

So Windows needs a stronger reason to exist it's going to dissuade the average consumer from buying either the market leader (Apple) or the cheap alternative (Android). Android is the real threat. A $200 PC replacement is quite feasible within a year and really deals a blow to Microsoft's business model.

I think his point was more that it can run an application as complex as Visual Studio, not necessarily that it can run VS itself.

Any tablet can create spreadsheets, but not as well as Excel. Any tablet can create a document, but not one that's going to be 100% compatible with the version of Word they have on their desktop PC. Those are all very strong reasons to buy a Windows Tablet.

What desktop PC? Running what? I do have a desktop PC and I do do business with Word documents. But on my latest machine I have yet to install Office (though I have two legal copies) because Google Docs works just fine.

Ah, I forgot that every person out there is like you.

Sarcasm aside, a lot of people still use Office. Far more than use Google Docs. Even businesses that are using Google Apps for e-mail still use Office for their documents. Being able to edit documents with 100% reliability on a tablet could be a big deal when it comes to corporate tablet purchases, for a start.

The moment a decent windows 8 tablet comes out, the iPads in our company will be gone.

Care to elaborate on the reasons why? Locked out of the network by paranoid sys admins? People will flock to the compatibility with existing apps? You work at MS?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/09/06/com...

"Microsoft’s average revenue from its Office suite licenses sold to enterprise and retail customers has been declining due to competition from cloud-based app providers like Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com, and also due to increasing lower priced products sales in emerging markets."

Sales have been declining- they haven't stopped.

There are still a ton of companies out there that use office. Creating a Windows Tablet could well cause sales of Office to increase.

The development tools are free. Visual Studio Express is free. They are all you need for most any development scenario.

If for some reason, you need another edition of the development, you can get them free if you're a student (DreamSpark), a startup (BizSpark), or cheaper than $700 (MSDN sub).

I'd be interested to know why Express doesn't work for you?

The killer app for the enterprise is Excel. Having native PowerPivot access to your Sharepoint hosted data is worth the price of admission. And if they do a Metro Excel -- game over in the enterprise.

For consumers its less clear. Maybe XBox Live.

FYI: Metro and its tile interface predates Flipboard.

Referring to the RSS reader.

> the desktop that you've grown used to in Windows 7 is still present, albeit as an app

Interesting parallel with the introduction of Windows. Windows 3.1 still ran entirely on top of DOS; but DOS was demoted in Windows 95 and replaced entirely in Windows NT, from which point it has run as a VM on top of the OS.

Add to that the fact that Hyper-V is part of Windows 8 - interesting possibilities.

Is the Windows 7 Desktop a self-contained app in Windows 8, or is Windows 8 Metro UI a front-end atop the Windows 7 Desktop?

According to TIMN it's running an Intel Core i5. Wow. Seriously? I realize this is just a developer preview device, but if Windows 8 needs that kind of power, then what about ARM tablets that are supposed to compete with iPad? How will it run on them? And how much battery life will it have on those Intel-powered tablets? These questions are all unanswered and Engadget didn't even touch on any of them.

"All of the above sections should give you a solid look at what Windows 8 is shaping up to be, but what about the hardware? While we got a look at the OS running on a few laptops and all-in-ones during the press preview meeting, we’ve spent most of the time testing the OS on the prototype tablet. Powered by a 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M processor and a 64GB solid state drive, the system is absolutely no slouch on performance — everything from scrolling in the browser to the Start screen is extremely speedy and the system boots incredibly quickly. However, fan noise is very noticeable, as is the heat coming out of the top vent, and a fast boot doesn’t excuse the slow wake-up times compared to ARM-based cellphones and tablets."

http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/13/windows-8-tablet-photos-v...

They also showed ARM devices from NVIDIA, Samsung, and Qualcomm running the same build of Windows 8 with no problems.

These questions aren't unanswered; Windows 8 has been demoed on many ARM devices now, and the build conference demos show specifically how tuned for power usage it is. The new kernel is very much focused on power management.

These are developer devices - meant for compiling code. Therefore, they are high powered, chock full of every hardware feature that Win 8 will support, so that devs can play around with them, compile code and use them as their primary machine. This is a desktop replacement machine for development, not an iPad replacement.

What? You are suggesting that people develop on the tablet? That is not how it works for iOs, BB, Palm or Android,

Windows 8 isn't iOS, BB, Palm, or Android. What they're trying to show is that Windows 8 can be the OS on your desktop, your laptop, and your tablet. Microsoft has made it clear that they still consider tablets to be PCs, even if the primary input methods are different.

In reality, the gap between Arm and x86 isn't all that big.

You are used to seeing Arm in phones, designed for power efficiency and slim profile. There are also tablets, which have more powerful Arm systems. However, batteries make up the bulk of these devices. They trick you in this respect. You are used to Arm being 'lite' and 'low profile'.

Then we have x86 systems. You are used to seeing these in desktops, that use hundreds of watts. In laptops, these can get much better efficiency. The problem is most laptops only have small batteries. x86 compilers have also evolved over a much longer time, so they are more efficient in their job. So you are used to x86 being 'bulky' and 'powerful'.

This explains why Engadget never said anything about the hardware it was running on. They were prohibited to say anything about it. I wonder why?

"Keep this in mind as you read: both the operating system and hardware are developer preview builds. In fact, the [REDACTED] hardware (we're prohibited from even revealing its manufacturer or specs) isn't even going to run Windows 8."*

http://gizmodo.com/5839665/windows-8-slate-hands-on-its-fant...

I don't know why you're making a big deal of this in multiple posts but the specs were shown in a slide in BUILD, so it's not like a big secret or conspiracy to hide the specs.

Am I the only one who virtually never uses windows desktop? I am either in particular app, or just click "start", type a few letters and run what I need. My desktop is just a background when nothing is running. Windows 8 new desktop might make it useful again.

I don't use a desktop on any OS for anything other than temp storage for files. I use Chrome/Geany/terminal 90% of the time and I have quick launch shortcuts for those in both Windows and Linux.

On my Android phone, however, I use the "desktop" exclusively to find what I need. Maybe transitioning desktop UI's to something similar is a great move.

Exactly. When using Windows I have Firefox set to download to the desktop, from which I file things into their target folders or the trash. Otherwise, my desktop is icon free.

My desktop is split between two monitors; the left monitor is for regular work and is usually covered up by full-screen (or close to it) applications. The right monitor is full of a cascade of windows, so each window is selectable from their bottom left corners.

Apart from that, the background is just used to show pictures. It's surprisingly awkward with multiple monitors: I had to write a program that composed the pictures I wanted to display, then set that new picture as a tiled background. If you don't do that correctly, and you have multiple monitors with different resolutions, you end up with either the same image on all monitors, or clipped / stretched / distorted versions on all but the "home" monitor (the one that owns (0,0)).

You should also get Launchy http://www.launchy.net/

It's the best thing since sliced bread for Windows, I've been using it for a couple of years now and can't go back. Just hit alt-space, enter few letters and launch. Just like Awesomebar but for launching apps. It indexes all files if you want and it's quick as snap.

Apparently it's also available for Mac and Linux.

I have mixed feelings for developing for Windows 8. I got my hands a little on Visual Studio, and it's hands-down the most powerful, stable and complete IDE I ever used.

If Microsoft could have something similar for coding with JavaScript,and HTML; along with tools for storage, database, revision control, testing, jquery... integrated inside that IDE. Well, I just can't miss programming with it.

I was at a .NET user group meeting last week. Scott Hanselman showed off the current development build; guess what, it has the same support for HTML, JS, Jquery, and CSS editing that it has for MS languages.

Mind-blowing :) Anything online showing this?

I guess you can try it yourself (if you have a VM or a partition to spare). Steven Sinofsky says they're going to make Windows 8 Developer Preview ISOs (with and without development tools) available to everyone:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/13/welcome-to-win...

So, it's not "Windows Tablet 8", or "Windows Mobile 8", just "Windows 8"? Does this mean this is also going to be the desktop OS?

Yes, it's one OS for all Windows devices.

I think that's the eventual plan, but Phones will still have their separate OS for now, right? Unless they announced something differently today...

Phones will continue to have a separate OS, but as both are branded Metro, I would hazard most users wouldn't be aware of there being any difference. One is just on a smaller screen and doesn't come with the desktop fallback.

Metro will also be appearing on 360 soon.

Really? I'd heard the opposite - Windows Phone 8 will _be_ Windows 8. Has anything been said at Build to the contrary?

Why isn't Engadget mentioning the chip it's running. That's very strange. Because if it does run Intel's chip as rumored, then this is the version to run on the desktop, but not the one to run on ARM, so it probably has lower battery life.

http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/13/windows-8-tablet-photos-v... gruber linked to that one. chip is mentioned, it's a 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M.

I see that Gruber's already piling on the snark about it having a fan etc. What he misses is that there's choice, if you want a fanless ARM tablet, Windows 8 will run on it, there were a lot of demos of it doing so. But if you want a more powerful tablet with a Core i5 processor and don't mind the heat and noise that much, then there that option too. Whereas if you want a more powerful iPad, you're SOL.

His next two posts are even worse.

Gruber is nothing but a partisan hack and this proves it. No wonder he is held in high regard only by Apple enthusiasts.

I mean, am I only one that sees a 'powerful' tablet as a drawback?

Size, weight and battery life are three of the most important features of my iPad. Further, the non-fragmentation of the App Store is nice, a 1G iPad can run pretty much everything a 2G iPad can.

Why would I want to buy in to an ecosystem where developers are worrying about developing to the lowest common denominator? Would they consider optimizing their App for the 10% of their market that bought the Core i5 tablet vs for the ARM (in a total market size with 5 % of the tablet market)?

What benefit would you really see from a tablet with so much processing power? A I going to sacrifice all of that battery life so I can render video faster?

Ok, but what if they just let the tablet run all the apps that work on the desktop. Great. Now my overpowered tablet that has two hours of battery life and has a fan in it is running apps that aren't even optimized for a tablet form factor?

This does not bode well.

I agree, the "powerful tablet" seems like a genre without a market. iPad style tables are attractive because they are extremely small, light, and have excellent battery life. Why would I buy a larger, heavier tablet with poor battery life when I can buy a similar laptop instead?

The iPad is popular largely because it's something completely different from what's already there. A big tablet with an i5 and three hours of battery life is pretty much the same as what already exists in the PC space.

The thing is that you will have a choice. I'll be able to get a 17" hex core, dual HD power machine while my wife/kids can have a arm powered tablet. Both machines will be able to run the same metro apps.

Personally, I like power tablets. I got an android instead of an iPad (I gave away my iPad) because of the added functionality (usb in, hdni out). If I could have a windows tablet instead, I'd be a very happy camper.

I don't mean power tablets in terms of functionality, but rather in terms of raw computing power. Your Android tablet has nice features but it's still an efficient ARM processor which would be completely destroyed in any benchmark by a decent laptop. The question is, would you buy a power-hungry hex core tablet if one were available, rather than an ARM tablet or a powerful laptop? More pertinently, would enough people buy one to make it a viable market?

Further, the non-fragmentation of the App Store is nice, a 1G iPad can run pretty much everything a 2G iPad can. Why would I want to buy in to an ecosystem where developers are worrying about developing to the lowest common denominator?

Funny how when Apple released the iPad2 they talked up how much faster it was than than the iPad, but I didn't hear a whole bunch of people talking about worrying about the lowest common denominator then. Do you think the iPad3 will only be as fast as the iPad2? The iPhone5 as slow as the 3GS?

Perf deltas are something people get an understand pretty well.

I don't think you're the only one. How many times has the "computer in tablet form" been tried now? How many more will it have to fail before MS realize they have to make a change. The complete lack of creativity from that company can be shocking. "I know! Let's do the same thing again but bigger/smaller!"

Care to link to some of the lots of demos? It would be interesting to compare the performance.

Here is one from back in June.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MnEndww2YQ&hd=1

Gizmodo mentions that this device isn't intended to run Windows 8 but is actually a Windows 7 Slate device that is being used as a prototype.

What's really interesting to me is that Windows 8 seems almost entirely focused on the consumer market. What about those of us using our desktop PCs every day to do real work?

I mean, do we really have to boot into that fancy-pants Metro UI every time we want to actually get something done?

I'm totally fine with swiping this way and that when using a tablet PC (I love my iPad), but when I sit down at a desktop PC, I want a mouse/keyboard driven experience - period.

Very excited to play with this hands-on tonight/tomorrow. My only concerns are as follows:

- Multiple monitors. How does this play nicely with them, and how I traditionally lay-out several open applications across them? Can one monitor be Metro UI and the other be the classical desktop? Or, can I have a full-screen app on one monitor that doesn't brick the other screen? (Looking at you, OSX Lion)

- App windows that might not necessarily fit into the tile or fullscreen approach. The prime example of this is my chat/social desktop or space. I typically have a contacts list, tabbed chat window, IRC, and twitter feed all on the same monitor arranged around one another. I know they demoed a way to do split-screen apps while still in the Metro UI, but it seemed to be too simple for real use.

- How jarring is the switch between Metro and the retro desktop? If I'm going along fine at 90% productivity living completely in the Metro UI on my monitors, and then all of a sudden need to open a small window from a legacy app, is that going to completely monopolize my workspace? If half of my apps work in Metro, and the other half don't while programming, am I going to have to keep switching between the UIs every 30 seconds as I'm working? That would be a pretty big deal-breaker.

For multiple monitors - yes, you can have 1 monitor dedicated for Metro and the other for classic Desktop and I believe you can flip between them as well. And believe the keynote demo also addressed your 2nd question on that.

Yeah, if you are familiar with Display Fusion, all that functionality is now build into windows.

Ok, Metro looks nice. I just hope they do similar to Apple and provide something between "mouse" and "touch"... like all the trackpad gestures Apple uses to make their desktop OS more touch-oriented while avoiding the dreaded gorilla arm https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Touchscreen#G...

I think Windows 8 will be interesting. The one thing I don't like about Windows, since Vista, is the splintering of the client version (basic, home, professional, ultimate). I think MS should just make one client version for a flat $150.00.

Microsoft isn't Apple. Their biggest customers aren't end users; they're large corporations with thousands of users, and PC manufacturers. Tempting end users is just marketing to them.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

You're probably right, but having so many versions of Windows is asinine, in my opinion.

I actually prefer taht. It gives me a choice to pay for whatever I need to use as opposed to Apple where no matter whether I need it or not, I have to pay.

Yeah, but the differences are artificial in nature. Everything is installed, regardless of which version you use, so that anytime upgrade will work.

The touch-enabled part of this preview and the fact that Microsoft stays close to their excellent Metro UI looks very promising. I also see the point of keeping the traditional windows elements like the desktop or explorer. However I really don't get why the explorer has to stay that traditional. I'm sure there would have been a way to make it usable with mouse AND touch input - maybe by replacing all those ribbon elements by only the most commonly used actions as icon only, preferably in Metro style.

Right now this feels like an unnecessary break from the promising and fresh approach that is Metro on a desktop (or tablet).

This is largely an entrepreneurial site, so tell me: if you tried a concept and it failed, then you repackaged and tried again with another failure (redo this step multiple times as necessary), then saw someone else alter your concept and have enormous success would you:

a) Learn from them and make a product that competes in that space or

b) Try your same multiple-times-failed strategy again?

If you're MS it seems option b is the right answer. PC in tablet form, take... what, 5?

In what why is this the same strategy? Windows 8 has a completely new API. Win32, which has been around since the early 90s is gone. The new API doesn't even have the concept of overlapping windows. WinRT talks directly to the kernel. In that respect, Windows 8 is as much of a "new thing" as the iPad or Android or any other tablet OS.

The only thing they've chosen to do differently is in marketing. The other tablet OSes are marketed as completely new things and Microsoft is marketing it as an iteration on an old thing.

Is it going to be the same thing they sell on the desktop? That's the goal, right? So it's PC in tablet form. Just like every time they've tried it before.

It's a tablet in desktop form. Everything but the kernel was rewritten with the tablet as the default use case.

A somebody who does .Net development as a day job. This is very exciting!

Will I have to do a clean install of the OS?

In my opinion, one should never do a in place upgrade of a OS across major versions. Back up your files first and then do a proper install.

Debian (and Ubuntu) users have been doing it for many, many years without severe problems.

This looks pretty nice, its good to see M$ being able to step so far out of their comfort zone vis-a-vis competition between the 'core' windows franchise and the 'other' products. My belief was that the thing that really killed the 'Tablet' version of windows was that they didn't have an 'all in' mode where there was no legacy PC stuff there.

'M$' ? Really? Didn't expect to see that on HN. Thought people were more mature here.

I agree, that the HN community would downvote folks who complement Microsoft seems very immature indeed.

Criticizing Microsoft also gives a lot of downvotes with it.

Thats why windows 8 stories are somewhere on the middle of the front apge whereas the top story is about some tweak google did to their flight search. This is HN!

Out of their comfort zone? They're just trying "full pc in tablet form" yet again.

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