We’re here in Anaheim, California at Microsoft’s BUILD conference. As has become tradition Microsoft has been holding major developer conferences for their new OSes roughly a year ahead of launch. In 2008 developers and the press got their first in-depth look at Windows 7 at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), and here in 2011 BUILD is doing much the same for Windows 8.
Today the show kicks off in earnest with a keynote that begins at the same time as this article went live, however yesterday was the first press session, with Microsoft spending most of the day running the press through a series of presentations focused on the end-user. We also had a chance to spend some time using an x86 tablet running Windows 8, with the tablet being the focal point of Microsoft’s new Metro interface. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s start at the beginning. There’s a great deal to discuss about Windows 8, and Metro is the centerpiece.
Along with ECS, ASRock invited me to tour their HQ as well. ECS and ASRock are two distinctly different companies from the inside, compared to what people may think from the outside – there are plenty of comparisons to be made. For a start, where ECS has a 20 floor building all to itself in the middle of Taipei, ASRock have two floors of a relatively smaller building on the outskirts.
As part of our Computex coverage, I was invited to attend a specialized tour of the ECS HQ and have a chance to participate in a group Question and Answer session with ECS’ Vice President of their Channel Business Unit, David Chien.
Along with the main retailers, the minor ones are also showcasing products. We’ve reviewed Biostar products before at AnandTech, but not Jetway and Giada, both of which are now selling consumer level products in North America. Our main criticism with Biostar in the past is PCIe and feature placement. ...
In the modern era, we’ve had systems from CoolIt, Corsair, Antec and others who are trying to bridge the barrier between high-end air-cooling and low-end water-cooling. At Computex, it is clear to see that there are a few more options on the horizon for consumers. Cooler Master has produced all-in-one ...
In general, we see a trend in the market preference for quieter, smaller, cheaper, and more powerful GPUs. In reality, we might see two or three of these features in a product, at the expense of the other(s). I took the opportunity to visit as many vendors as ...
We've already talked about Lion and iOS 5, Apple's other WWDC topics, and both look like worthwhile extensions of existing products, but Apple squeezed its most interesting announcement in at the end of the keynote: iCloud, its long-anticipated cloud computing service.
After giving us a look at OS X 10.7 Lion in its WWDC keynote today, Apple turned to what is seen as the more important of its OS platforms at the moment: iOS.
Apple kicked of its Worldwide Developers conference this year with a keynote meant to showcase three of its biggest software undertakings at the moment: Mac OS X, iOS, and iCloud, the latter of which being its new cloud computing service.
This week at Computex, along with the ASUS announcement of the Padfone, the UX series, and the $199 MeeGo netbook, we also have had a glimpse into what the Republic of Gamers line will have for enthusiasts and overclockers very shortly, including the Danshui Bay concept reported on earlier. One of ...
ASUS have been coming to Computex to sensationalize and dazzle the press with concepts for years, and this year is no different, regardless of whether something is technically feasible or not. Last year, we saw the ASUS Immensity motherboard concept that was never put into production – an X58 ...
The very first enthusiast SSDs had their roots in USB drives. Memory vendors that were making USB sticks thought to put a bunch of NAND in parallel behind a rudimentary NAND to SATA controller and you had an SSD. Performance characteristics looked great on paper but of course there were ...
Microsoft showed us IE10 on Windows 8, which honestly has a very iOS-like feel to it. You get smooth scrolling and panning, with a PlayBook style support for tabs. It's amazing how much of the Windows 8 UI looks a lot like RIM's first tablet. The URL bar is hidden by ...
Microsoft just showed Windows 8 running on three different ARM platforms: a single-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, a dual-core TI OMAP 4430 and a quad-core NVIDIA Kal-El notebook. The same interface we showed you earlier exists on these systems, and the same applications can run across both systems (assuming the apps have ...
Here's a quick look at the new start screen for Windows 8 running on a Dell XPS Development Tablet. The tablet supports both touch and external keyboard interfaces. The UI is ridiculously smooth, it seems even quicker than Windows Phone 7. On tablets Windows 8 will support PlayBook like bezel gestures ...
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