Windows 8 Complete Review

Tuesday 20 November 2012

Windows 8 Complete Review

Microsoft has finally released its game-changing operating system, Windows 8. This is the biggest change to the operating system since the launch of Windows 95. However, Reviewing an operating system is an odd endeavor, because people don’t really use operating systems; they use applications. The OS should be as transparent as possible, acting as a platform for applications.

Here's our Windows 8 review.Its only the Windows 8 review you are going to need.

1. Touch

It’s one thing for a device to support touch — it’s quite another to do it well. Anyone who has used an underpowered Android tablet (looking at you, Archos) knows what I’m talking about. For today’s users, any lag or unresponsiveness simply won’t be tolerated.

Of course, Windows 8 was designed with touch in mind from the start, and it shows. The app tiles are big and friendly to fingers of all sizes, and most apps follow the same minimalist design style as the system’s user interface (formerly known as Metro, and now generally called the “modern UI”). The modern UI is all about keeping things visually simple, organizing content into clear columns along a horizontal scroll, with large headings and icons. When you swipe, motion is fast and fluid.

Touch on a non-touchscreen device is handled through the touchpad, which is surprisingly not that awkward. When you’re using a mouse pointer instead of touching the screen, you call up menus by navigating into the corners, as opposed to the sides, which is how it works with touch. I’m not a big fan of this disparity — I think it confuses your gadget “muscle memory” and I’d bet new users take a while to figure out all the nuances of it (sliding the mouse pointer up from a corner to reveal apps running, for example).

Overall, Windows 8 provides a great touch experience, but for most setups I’d recommend getting a separate mouse and keyboard if you opt for a tablet device. Even if you intend to use your PC mainly for “consumption,” Windows just naturally lends itself to hunkering down and getting some work done — no matter what the device’s form factor is.

2. User Interface

Microsoft's Windows 8 user interface, originally referred to as Metro-inspired — a nod to the company's internal design language — is as stunning as it is surprising. Taking visual elements from Microsoft's Windows Phone design, the Start screen is the first thing you'll experience when you log in. There's no Start button, no desktop — just rows of colorful, constantly changing tiles. The interface can be customized with backgrounds and colors for those wishing to dig deeper. If you've configured a Microsoft account that uses Outlook.com or Hotmail, then you'll notice that email, calendar, and contacts will automatically appear. If your Microsoft account is linked to Facebook, your Facebook contacts will also appear in the People app and its associated tile. Immediately, this unfamiliar interface already looks like it's customized to you, with your friends' faces ticking away on the People Live Tile and photos you've stored on SkyDrive or Facebook showing up automatically on the associated Live Tile

3. Universal Search

We'd add, too, that once you master this new layout, there are lots of useful things about the OS that feel like clear improvements over previous versions of Windows. If you make the same pinch-to-zoom gesture you'd use to zoom in and out of web pages, you can shrink the Start Screen so that you can see all your pages of apps at once. As you can imagine, that's useful if you have a large collection of apps and don't want to page horizontally through eight home screens.

Additionally, once you bring up the Start screen you can start typing to search for something. As any Windows user will tell you, you can already more or less do this in Win 7, except here you don't even need to find a search bar. The results will immediately pop up on the right side of the screen. From within the search results pane, you'll see the results are divided into files, settings and applications. Admittedly, this method of search isn't obvious to new users, but again, you only need to learn it once. After that, it's quite convenient.

4. Charms bar

The Charms bar is another brand new feature. It appears when you swipe your finger in from the right-hand edge of the screen. Those with a mouse can point the cursor to the top- or bottom-right corner of the screen (these are two of the new 'hot' corners in Windows 8).

From the top, you have Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings. Search is a replacement for the search box in Windows 7 and Vista, but a more capable version. The Share charm allows you to share things with people, but the options will change depending on which app is running. Extra sharing options will appear when you install apps that can share content, such as Twitter clients.

Start takes you back to the Start screen if you're in another app, or switches to the most recent app if you're on the Start screen.

Click or tap the Devices icon to show relevant connected devices. Printers, speakers, screens and network devices will be shown in a list. You can click on one to change its settings, or use any of its capabilities

Finally, Settings gives quick access to Wi-Fi settings, volume, screen brightness and notifications options. It also provides a link to the new, streamlined control panel, simply named Settings. Clicking on the Settings charm will also show settings specific to the current app, so you might see common Help and About links for most apps, but an extra Accounts option for Mail, say.

5. Multitasking, Modern UI Style

When it comes to switching apps, you can use that Switcher gesture, but there are other built-in features designed to make multitasking a bit easier. For starters, Snap allows you to dock a window or app so that it takes up either a third or two-thirds of the screen. That leaves room for a second app, which you can snap into the remaining space. That's actually quite similar to Aero Snap from Windows 7, except here the dimensions are in thirds, instead of half the screen. As in the Win 7 version of this feature, you can't manually re-size these windows: once they snap into place they're going to take up a predictable amount of space (i.e., one third of the screen).

Also, in Windows 8 you can mix up the proportions by sliding the border of a window across the screen. Say, for instance, you're working on a Word document on two-thirds of the screen, with IE 10 sitting off to the side. You might be spending most of your time typing in Word, but if you need to do a web search, you can just put your finger on the border between the two windows, and drag it over so that now the web browser takes up more space. It's also worth noting that you can mix and match traditional desktop programs and Modern (formerly known as "Metro") apps. In some cases, this can mean fewer jarring jumps between the desktop and more touch-friendly apps.

Snap is a trick you can pull off if you're using a touchscreen device or a traditional mouse and keyboard. Whether you're using your finger or a cursor, you need to drag down on the app from the top of the screen before it can be docked into place. If you are using a mouse, you can also hover in the upper-left corner of the screen to expose open apps. What you'll see isn't a list, per se, but a series of preview thumbnails -- miniaturized versions of whatever's going on in that window (your Outlook.com inbox, your SkyDrive home screen, et cetera). From there, you can click on a thumbnail to switch to that app, or you can right-click to close one. Like so many other features in Windows 8, this feels less clumsy with practice, though even after months of testing, we find the swiping Switcher gesture feels smoother, more intuitive.

6. Personalization options

To some extent, you can control the look and feel of Windows 8. No, there's no bringing back the Start button, but you can select different color themes for your Start Screen. Toward the end of the Windows 8 development process, Microsoft added so-called Personalization Tattoos -- essentially, Start Screen backgrounds with patterns and borders. So long as you're signed into your PC using a Microsoft account, this, too, will follow you to other Windows 8 devices you might log into. Get another Win 8 PC down the line, and it will show your paisley background as soon as you sign in for the first time.

7. Notifications and Lock screen

One last radical change for Windows 8 is the changes to the lock screen. A colorful design with mountains and Seattle’s space needle will greet you every time you start a Windows 8 PC (you can customize the picture as well). Microsoft has opted to provide time, date, calendar entries, network status, and battery levels as default, but you can display up to seven lock screen apps that will provide quick status and notifications when a screen is locked. This is particularly useful if you want to glance at a mobile device to see how many calendar appointments you have during the day or the amount of emails in your inbox.

Microsoft has created a built in picture password option that will allow you to sign in by tapping secret areas on a picture of your choice. It works in a similar way to Android’s pattern unlock, but you select three separate touch points to create a password. There’s also options to use a PIN or the traditional password, but the picture password is a unique aspect that works well on touch-enabled devices. System-wide notifications are also present in Windows 8. There’s two types of notifications — app and system. App notifications provide a quick pop-up "toast" that disappears after a few seconds. If you miss this type of notifications, then the Live Tiles should provide the data required as Microsoft has opted not to include a notification center — something I’d expect they may add in later releases. System notifications are triggered for operating system events such as low battery levels or a warning from Microsoft’s SmartScreen system — a phishing and malware security filter built into Windows 8. A full-screen notification banner will take over and require input before it’s removed.

8. Desktop

For the most part, the desktop should feel familiar to Windows 7 users.

For the most part, the desktop should feel pretty familiar to Windows 7 users, especially compared to that redesigned Start Screen. Still, there are some differences here, too. For starters, the Aero UI is no more, which means windows no longer have a transparent border. Everything here is flat and two-dimensional, not unlike those new Live Tiles.

In a move that will please power users, Windows 8 also ushers in improved multi-monitor support, with the ability to display different desktop backgrounds on multiple displays, as well as have a single picture span those various screens. You also have the choice of expanding the Taskbar across those monitors, or setting it up so that a pinned program only appears on the same screen where that app is running. All told, it's a welcome improvement, though it would be nice if you could run Modern UI-style Windows 8 apps on more than one monitor at a time. Also, if you do have a multi-monitor setup, you'll find it's trickier than usual to pull up the Charms Bar using a mouse.

Other changes: Windows Explorer is now called File Explorer, and bears the same Ribbon UI already used in Microsoft apps like Office and Paint. There's also now a File History feature, which stores versions of files similar to Time Machine in Apple's OS X. The Task Manager has also received a makeover so that when you first launch it, all you see is a list of open apps. Nothing about processes or memory usage; just a list of programs, and an "End task" button. Click "More details," though, and you'll see a half-dozen tabs, showing you everything from performance graphs to CPU usage to running processes. In the processes tab, in particular, there are four columns showing CPU, memory, disk and network usage, with the resource hogs highlighted in a darker color.

One thing that hasn't changed: the keyboard shortcuts. The same ones you relied on in Windows 7 will work here, which should take some of the sting out of getting used to a new user interface.

9. Built-in apps

Mail

Setting up the Mail app is easy: if the Microsoft ID you use to initially sign in is tied to Gmail, or some other service not run by Microsoft, it automatically prompts you for your email password. In the case of Gmail, we had the option of syncing our Google contacts and Calendar as well (we said yes). There are also easy setup options for Hotmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo and AOL, though you can add accounts from other services too. Even if you don't link a Hotmail or Outlook account, the Mail app will import all your folders and labels -- everything, really, but your starred items, in Gmail. Those folders take up just a narrow pane on the left side of the screen. Next to that is a wider window where you can see each individual message, along with previews and, when applicable, thumbnails of the contact who wrote to you.

The email itself takes up the most space, stretching across the entire right third of the screen. Up top, above the message, you'll find icons for creating a new message, replying / forwarding and deleting. (We always did like the in-line delete button in Outlook.com, so we're glad to see that design touch carries over here too.) If you swipe the top or bottom edge of the screen for the options menu, you can refresh your inbox, or move a message to another folder. Also, if you have more than one email account hooked up, you can pin a particular inbox to the Start Menu.

All told, it's easy to use; we just wish there were easy-access buttons for archiving and marking junk mail as spam. Unfortunately, too, you don't have direct access to certain of Hotmail and Outlook.com's finer features, like the ability to "Sweep" newsletters and other so-called gray mail into out-of-the-way folders. However, if you set up Sweep on Hotmail.com our Outlook.com, the Mail app in Windows 8 will still follow whatever rules you have in place.

Calendar

As promised, when we chose to sync our Google contacts and Calendar, our appointments all promptly showed up in the built-in Calendar app. (If you're not a Google user, you can also link your Hotmail, Outlook.com or Exchange / Office365 calendar.) The default view is by month, which is a bit too busy for our tastes -- you can only see two appointments per day, even if there are many more. We highly suggest selecting the daily or weekly view in the menu options hidden at the bottom of the screen. If you're creating an appointment from scratch, you'll have the same options as if you were doing this online: everything from date to time slot to reminder alerts
People

The People app doubles as an address book and a one-stop shop for social networking updates. Using the settings menu in the Charms Bar, you can link all sorts of accounts -- things like Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Obviously, the more of these services you connect, the more contacts will pop up in your People Hub. All told, it works similarly to the People Hub in Windows Phone, which is to say everyone you know gets a contact card that pulls in all available forms of contact -- everything from email to a Twitter handle. Open your own contact card and you can update your Facebook status as well as post, favorite or reply to tweets.

When you open People Hub you'll see your contacts arranged in alphabetical order, and you scroll from left to right to move through the list. As with the Start Screen, you can use pinch-to-zoom to shrink a long list. In this case, you won't see every contact onscreen; just a tile for each letter of the alphabet, making it easier to jump to a certain part of your list.

Also in the People Hub are Live Tiles for social networking / messaging notifications, as well as a "What's new" page, showing a horizontal feed containing your friends' recent Facebook and Twitter updates. Though the People Hub is easy to use in general, we tended not to rely on the "What's new" stream, as a long list of social updates is easier to view in a vertical list than a horizontal one.

IE 10

In Windows 8, you get not one, but two versions of the IE 10 browser: one for the desktop, and a more touch-friendly one that lives on the Start Screen. Both versions have a Chrome-like setup, with a single bar for URLs and web searches. The two also sync with each other, which wasn't the case in earlier builds of the OS.

There are, as you can imagine, some UI differences. In the desktop version, though, adding a tab is as easy as pressing a plus sign. In the more touch-optimized version, you swipe from the top of the screen to expose open tabs, or open a new one. IE 10 also has a feature allowing you to either swipe or click an onscreen arrow button to proceed to the next page, whether that's the next page of search results or the next page in a news story broken up into nine pieces.

As far as content goes, IE 10 is HTML5-based, though the desktop version supports Flash and Silverlight as well. In the touch-friendly version of the browser, only certain sites on the Compatibility View list support Flash. So, we can't promise you'll be able to run the site you want, but that Flash exceptions list at least includes popular sites like YouTube and Vimeo. And besides, with HTML5 being as ubiquitous as it is, you really shouldn't run into any issues.

From a privacy standpoint, Do Not Track comes enabled by default, which means sites can only track and collect your private data if you go out of your way to turn off "Do Not Track."

Camera

Windows' built-in camera app is simple: a full-screen frame (if you choose a 16:9 resolution), with a few options always visible at the bottom. These include a timer, video mode and a "change camera" toggle (assuming there are front and rear cameras). There's also a "camera options" icon, but from there you can only switch the resolution or choose another audio recording option, if applicable.

Right now, at least, there are no photo filters, like sepia, and nothing in the way of HDR or panorama mode. The camera app is also missing tap-to-focus, which can be a minor nuisance or an unfortunate problem, depending on the tablet you're using. Still, as we saw on the ASUS VivoTab RT, PC makers have the option of adding secondary camera apps that mimic the look and feel of the stock camera application, but add a few more special effects. Without any of these additional features we've come to expect, the native camera app feels like a bit of an afterthought.

SkyDrive

In addition to creating a dedicated Sky Drive app for Windows 8, Microsoft made over the browser version of its cloud storage service. As ever, people signing up for a new Microsoft account get 7GB of free lifetime storage. However, if you recall, folks who had previously uploaded files as of April 22 of this year had the option of opting into 25GB of storage. If you're already enthusiastic about Windows and the Microsoft ecosystem at large, chances are this describes you.

Whether you log in online or use the Win 8 app, each folder or file takes the form of a tile. When using the browser, these tiles sit as a grid, with the various thumbnails stacked on top of each other. In the Windows 8 app, you scroll through them horizontally by default, though you can also view them in list format. Whichever app you use, you can upload or download files, as well as create new folders. With the web version, though, you can also create a new Word document, PowerPoint presentation, Excel spreadsheet or OneNote workbook -- something you can't do in the Win 8 app.

Messaging

Messaging is your native IM app. For now, you can link it with Microsoft Messenger (of course) or Facebook chat. Though it would be nice to add Google Talk, the way you can add your Gmail address in the Mail app, we're not surprised that Microsoft has excluded the competition here.

Photos

Similar to the People app, Photos pulls in pictures from all sorts of sources: Facebook, Flickr, Sky Drive and your PC's local storage. As a portal for viewing and sharing photos, it's great. You can run a slide show, and use the context-aware sharing feature in the Charms Bar to easily upload pics to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other websites. You can also pull in pics from another PC you may own -- so long as you install the SkyDrive desktop client on that system and select the check box next to "Let me use SkyDrive to fetch any of my files on this PC."

Additionally, you can also share photos through email. It's also easy to select photos to upload in batches: just swipe the top of the screen to expose the app settings, and then hit "Select all." If you want to remove an item from the list, just unchecked it. All in all, the app is easy to use, though more editing tools would be nice. Also, we kept trying to select photos by pressing down on them with our finger. The fact that you can't do this feels a bit unintuitive.
Games, Music and Video

We'll just lump these together since they all fall under the Xbox ecosystem. Through these apps, you can buy music, movies and Xbox Live games, with the additional option of renting some movies. For now, Windows Phone games are not supported in the way you can play some iOS games on both iPhones and iPads. It would seem logical of Microsoft to eventually make its Windows Phone games available on Windows 8 devices, but for now, you'll have to download different sets of apps for your tablet and smartphone.

Out of the box, Microsoft's Music app includes free, ad-supported streaming, available in 15 markets to start. Though the games compatibility is still somewhat compartmentalized, this music streaming feature will work across Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Xbox. Obviously, Microsoft has been in the business of selling music for some time, so by now its catalog is quite voluminous at 30 million songs. If you like, you can purchase Xbox Music Pass, an ad-free subscription, for $10 a month. Under this plan, your songs will follow you from device to device, just like the rest of your settings. Here, you'll also get the option of downloading music and listening to it offline, which you can't do with the free, ad-supported service. Similar to iTunes, too, Music includes a matching feature that takes music you already had stored on your computer and finds the cloud-based version.

Though it's not installed on Windows 8 machines out of the box, you can download Microsoft's SmartGlass app, which lets you stream music and video to an Xbox, using your Windows 8 device as a remote. All told, it's not unlike Apple's Air Play, though Smart Glass has the added benefit of not being limited to multimedia playback. You can also use it with Internet Explorer, in which case you also have the option of using an on-screen keyboard within the app.

10. Store

When Windows 8 went on sale a few days ago, Microsoft said the Windows Store was home to thousands of apps, though it declined to provide a precise number. For now, there are no first-party apps for Facebook and Twitter, which remains true on Windows 7 as well. (Twitter, at least, says it will have an app in the coming months.) Other missing biggies include: Foursquare, Mint, PageOnce, TripIt, NPR, Draw Something, Words with Friends, Temple Run, Spotify, Springpad, Remember the Milk, Instapaper, Pocket (formerly Read it Later), Flipboard, Steam, Instagram, Nook and Rdio. Still, there's reason to think many of these will arrive soon enough: in the weeks we spent working on this review, Netflix, The New York Times, Skype, Hulu Plus, Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds, Zinio and Bank of America all went live in the store. Dropbox, ESPN and PayPal are all coming soon, according to Microsoft. Other notables, like the AP, Box.net, Pandora and Slacker, have been available for quite some time already. And besides, who are we kidding? This is Windows we're talking about. The operating system that's going to ship on millions and millions of new PCs. Developers like Facebook would be wise to come up with something for Windows 8 posthaste. Still, in the first few weeks or months of owning your Window 8 device, you might find yourself making do with less familiar alternatives, or just loading up the browser version of the app.

Navigating the store feels like using any other Windows 8 app; you'll start off by seeing recommended apps, along with tiles for new releases and the top free apps. Keep scrolling to the right and you'll see apps broken down by category, such as social or entertainment. If you're less in the mood to meander and more in the mood to find something specific, you can search in one of two ways: you can swipe the Charms Bar and select the Search option, or you can just start typing. Yep, in the same way you can start typing to find something on the Start Menu, you can start typing to look up an app. If it's in the app store, it'll show up in the search results as a recommended pick. As convenient as that is, though, you can only do it on the main page of the Windows Store. Select a page like "Top Free Games" and that search method no longer works; you'll have to use the Charms Bar instead.

Once you find an app that strikes your fancy, you can read an overview, along with a summary of permissions you'll be granting the developer. You can also see a list of supported languages and check which processors are supported (this is especially useful if you have an ARM-based device running Windows RT and aren't sure it will run the same apps as an x86-based Windows 8 machine). Lastly, there's a tab for reviews, which you can sort by newest, oldest, lowest rating, highest rating or most helpful (yep, you can weigh in on specific comments). Payment methods in the Windows Store include credit cards and PayPal. Once you buy an app, you can install it on up to five devices at once.

Windows 8 vs. RT

This will be an inevitable source of confusion for consumers

Despite this being a Windows 8 review, it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft is also introducing a new version of Windows designed for ARM-based chipsets. Windows RT is based on Windows 8, with the new Windows 8-style user interface, but it will not run traditional desktop applications — an important difference to understand. Any apps built for prior versions of Windows simply won’t run in Windows RT. The desktop remains, but aside from the legacy built-in apps (like Paint or Notepad), the only desktop apps that run are Internet Explorer 10 desktop and Office 2013 RT. Microsoft has also removed the Windows Media Player desktop software in Windows RT in order to promote the built-in Music app.

Other than that, the Windows 8-style UI is identical and Windows RT will run the same Windows 8-style applications as Windows 8. I have previously discussed the confusing choice to keep a desktop mode in an operating system that will primarily ship on tablet hardware, but Microsoft is justifying this with its inclusion of Office 2013 RT. This will be an inevitable source of confusion for consumers once they realise that Surface RT tablets and other Windows RT tablets do not run legacy apps. It’s a confusion Microsoft could prevent with better marketing or the removal of the desktop mode in Windows RT.

The Final Mark

Windows 8 is a beautiful operating system and one that feels incredibly personal once it’s customized. Microsoft has a huge fight on its hands now to ensure developers create beautiful apps. Some of the best Android and iOS apps are created by organizations or individuals who have showed little interest in Microsoft. If the software maker can change people’s perceptions of Windows, from viruses to bluescreens, into one of speed and style then the apps will flow and Microsoft has a hit on its hands. If innovative developers ignore Windows 8 then Microsoft’s cash cow faces an uncertain future. Microsoft has laid down some solid foundations here, but as Ballmer has said many times before, it’s developers, developers, developers.