The Windows 8 consumer preview is loaded up with great features. Here are our five favourites.
Windows 8 is a radical departure from anything Microsoft has done before. When you try it for the very first time, it feels a bit like stepping out onto ice. It is so slick as to be slippery. Commands and icons and apps and menus glide on and off screen and things zoom in and out of its Metro interface in a near vertigo-inducing fashion. Getting your feet beneath you is tricky.
Want to try out a taste of Windows 8? Now you can, and it’s feature complete too. As promised, Microsoft’s unveiled the consumer preview of its latest and greatest operating system at MWC. It's made some 100,000 changes to the previously released pre-beta developer preview and has bundles in everything you’re likely to see in the final product.
In advance of the release of Windows 8, Microsoft has been showing us bits and pieces of its newly redesigned UI. Now, we're getting our first look at the newly redesigned logo, the latest in a lineage of iconic symbols for the operating system.
Purported screenshots of the soon to be announced Windows Phone 7.6 Tango have emerged on a Russian forum. There are a handful of new features, but what's really interesting is how little seems to have changed.
Up until late last week Windows 8 on ARM was a complete mystery. We know the product existed, that it would launch at some point in the future, and it would sport the Metro interface Microsoft has been showing off for almost a year now. The silence on just about everything else had led many to wonder if Microsoft was further behind on the ARM version than they were letting on, but this week they finally opened up the information floodgates.
Microsoft promised we'd see the Windows 8 Consumer preview before the end of February, and they're holding true to the word.
There are lot of hard jobs at Microsoft. Like the guy who collects Steve Ballmer's dry cleaning. But Sam Moreau just might have the hardest gig in Redmond. Or at least the most harrowing. Over the past five years, he's taken on the tiny task of redesigning the operating system used by like a billion people all over the world. You know, NBD.
Even if you don't use Windows often, you probably know to head for the Start button to get things rolling. Not any more, though, because Microsoft might be planning to dump the button in the next Windows release.
Skype has just updated its Windows client to enable full HD video calling allowing you converse in 1080p with your mates. Now you’ll be able to see every exquisite detail of their fugly beautiful faces.
Nokia bet the farm on its Windows Phone partnership with Microsoft, but so far it's been mum on potential Windows 8 tablets. That changed a bit today when CEO Stephen Elop implied it might be time.
According to Nokia's financial results, released today, Microsoft paid the Finnish company a cool $250m (£160m) in the final quarter of 2011 for adopting Windows Phone. That's just the first payment: in total these "platform support payments" will likely add up to billions. No wonder Nokia's keen. [Slash Gear]
