An early hands on with Windows 8

Not unlike an artfully created however tiny-portioned appetiser leading into a flavourful and filling main course that remains stuck in the kitchen, our first hands-on experience with Windows 8 left us eager for what was coming, yet disappointed with what was set in front of us.

The end of the Build conference preview

Microsoft lent out Windows 8 tablets to attendees at the end of the Build conference preview, surprisingly running an before version of the in-development operating system than the one that had been demonstrated as functional before in the day.

The operating system represents a major change for the company and its fans, as Windows wholeheartedly embraces and bets on touchscreen interfaces. Julie Larson-Green, vice president in charge of Windows 8, said, "People want to and expect to be able to touch their screens." She offered up a personal anecdote about a friend who roasts coffee professionally, and was frustrated going from the production line, where the screens are touch-based, to his office, where they weren't.

The same experience

We've had the same experience. The very first thing we did when testing out Google's Chromebook previously this year was to involuntarily poke our fingers at the screen. The expectations of smartphones and point-of-sale interactions have conditioned us to expect screens of all sizes to respond to touch input.

Whereas Windows 7 was a big change, because it taking everything into account made Vista's architecture palatable, Windows 8 is more like going to your favourite restaurant and finding it with an absolutely new decor, arrangement of tables, and expanded menu. And during we can read the menu and have a decent idea of what we're being served, we don't but know the precise smell or taste of the food.

The biggest change from Windows 7 is the much-discussed Metro interface. Is it merely a touch-tacular visual skin — Windows 7 with a large mango sitting on top? Or is it more of a dual offering, giving you two different ways to interface with their programs and apps, depending on how you're using the computer at any given moment?

Frankly, Windows 7 was already a decent supporter of touchscreens and gestures, so betting on mobile touchscreens isn't a massive leap of logic. What makes Windows 8 potentially revolutionary is that it's tying Metro, the first distinctly non-Windows experience ever, to the popular adoption of touchscreens. For whatever you call Metro — whether it's Windows Phone 7's Mango on growth hormones, or a grand terminal of multi-layered interaction — Metro is Microsoft's first major interface that does not in any way relate to the "windowed" experience from which the operating system derives its name. Microsoft is saying that traditional Windows is not enough spontaneously anymore.

Getting started in Windows 8 was remarkably easy, near as simple as firing up a Chromebook for the first time. On the tablet that Microsoft provided, Windows 8 booted in a few seconds to a green screen, where we filled out a name for the tablet, logged on to Wi-Fi and added personal information just as a username. Much like Google and Chromebooks, you can sign in using your Windows Live ID. The whole process, from pushing the power button to coming face to tile with Metro, took between 20 and 30 seconds.

Benchmarking start-up and shutdown times on the Windows 8 tablet was easy, because it in fact took us longer to type in our password on the touchscreen keyboard than it did for the tablet to get to the log-in screen. Three cold boots averaged 5.2 seconds. Shutdown took longer, at around 11 seconds over three shutdowns. During the shutdown time is as a matter of fact comparable with where Windows 7 is now, the boot time is faster by around 30 to 35 seconds.

Windows 8 launches by default into the Metro interface, which is remarkably intuitive in some ways. Instead of icons, you're confronted with groups of tiles. One of the key features that was demoed at Build that wasn't working in the tablets we were given was the ability to customise the tiles. We saw Jensen Harris, director of program management for the Windows 8 User Experience, change tile size and location, and move tiles between groups, and create new groups of tiles with a few quick swipes of his fingers against the screen. Frustratingly, we could not in fact do this ourselves.

The number of apps supported

The number of apps supported by Metro was few, and all had been created by Microsoft's summer interns in a handful of weeks. In spite of the obvious limitations, they point to the ability for Windows 8 to leap to the forefront of sharing data across multiple services, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Microsoft's own Windows Live tools. Other apps showed the potential of displaying real-time information on the screen, just as tweets, social network status updates, weather, stock market updates and news headlines via RSS.

Windows 8 brings a lot of legacy support with it. Microsoft says that it will work then on all hardware that currently supports Windows 7, a user-friendly contrast to Apple's forced hardware obsolescence.

Metro would be pretty, however it's little more than eye candy without being baked on top of its Windows foundation. That foundation provides something that the world has but to see elsewhere: a tablet that's not underpowered. Windows 8 can talk to Bluetooth peripheral keyboards, just as the one that Microsoft provided, as easily as it can communicate with printers. Instead of having to bootstrap contortions of cloud-based drivers onto systems that were never intended to recognise odd physical plug-ins, stuff of that sort just works. Or, until further notice, that's Microsoft's theory. There were no printers available to test it on. In Windows 8, swiping from the right edge of the screen to the centre will reveal options just as Search and Share, as then as a Devices button that recognises external monitors, drawing tablets and mice.

Matter of fact rethought how Windows manages drivers

It turns out that Windows 8 has as a matter of fact rethought how Windows manages drivers. Deep down, there's a new class of device driver that will work across a broad range of devices. Plug something in, and it'll just work, goes the line, and we were surprised to see this borne out when we plugged in our Droid Bionic. Instead of searching for the driver as Windows 7 does, which delays our ability to access the phone's SD card, it was available nearly instantly.

Handwriting support has been expanded in Windows 8 from Windows 7, so that the system makes it easier to accept input from styluses, and convert written notes to legible characters.

How to do windowed interfaces

Windows 8 has as well rethought how to do windowed interfaces, so be prepared to experience a whole lot of Microsoft Office-style ribboning. The only good news about this is that Windows' ability to pick up on touch gestures has been so vastly improved since Windows 7 that you'll until further notice be able to do things without poking at the screen like a kind of demented woodpecker.

Installing a program that's not directly supported by Metro will bump you over to the traditional interface and create a desktop icon for it there, however it will as well create a tile for that program in Metro. Tap the tile and the program opens in traditional Windows.

New Task Manager

Also in traditional Windows is a new Task Manager. Long ignored by Microsoft, this way-overdue redone Task Manager creates an in-grid heat map of high-usage programs, as so then as helping you to monitor more than just memory. You can drill down to your CPU, memory, disk or network usage.

No discussion of a new version of Windows would be complete without talking about security, and that appears to be slightly furthermore along than other parts of Windows 8. Metro apps run with runtime restrictions, which appear to function like Android app permissions. But, Microsoft promises to have tighter control over its Windows Store than Google has placed on its Android Market.

For log-ins, Windows 8 has several options. There's the traditional password, as then as a PIN option. There's a picture password choice, too, which is quite cool. You upload a picture, and at the time create a simple drawing over it using straight lines, circles and dots. When you log-in, you'll be presented with the image and asked to redraw the password over it. And since it's Windows — getting bored of that but? — it natively supports multiple user accounts, unlike Android or iOS tablets.

Secured boot feature

There's as well a secured boot feature, which enhances Windows' protection against low-level attacks like rootkits. Boot elements in the new OS are authenticated to prevent unauthorised tampering, and Windows 8 as well comes with two highly useful "reinstall" features. The "Refresh" option keeps all your data and files unaltered, however reloads Windows in every respect. It's not clear but what happens when a file that looks legitimate, like a Word doc, turns out to be malware — presumably, Windows clears it out while the refresh. The second reinstall option is called "Reset", and it wipes the computer and restores it to its factory state. Both of these work without install disks or having to download other recovery tools.

There's no doubt that Windows 8 is a major change for the company, and potentially a disruptive one for the market, as Microsoft aims to be the first company to successfully merge its mobile and desktop operating systems.

But will people want to use it? A lot of what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8 depends on a near measurable ton of factors. How shortly will the operating system be ready? How will Apple and Google respond, and will their responses make it to market earlier Windows 8 does? We were prepared to dislike it, since we're more impressed with the concept of Windows Phone 7 than we are with the execution of it, nevertheless anecdotal market innovation that Microsoft shared yesterday in the form of video testimony indicated that it could be very popular. One woman expressed disbelief that the device she was using was, to tell the truth, Windows. She's probably not the only one.

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