In-Depth with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview
by Andrew Cunningham, Ryan Smith, Kristian Vättö & Jarred Walton on March 9, 2012 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Microsoft
- Operating Systems
- Windows
- Windows 8
Now that we’ve covered the bulk of Windows’ new UI elements, it’s time to get down to some individual apps, and there’s no app more important to Windows 8’s success than the Windows Store.
Unfortunately, at this point it's a bit difficult to tell how the store is going to work out—it seems like one of the less-finished apps provided in the Consumer Preview. There are basic categories for games, social apps, music apps, and a few others, but aside from the basic Search functionality (which is accessed from the Charms menu), there's just a sprawling "top free" list and a lot of scrolling. The Windows Store definitely shouldn't be judged on this early iteration, but a lack of polish (unlike in other Metro screens, more tiles don't show up when more screen space is available—if you look at the Store on a screen with a vertical resolution of much more than 768 pixels, you'll just see a big unused area of white space below the Store tiles) and missing features make it a rough demo at best.
As in both the Apple and Android app stores, you’ll need to sign in with a Windows Live ID to download anything from the Windows Store. If you used your Windows Live ID to create an account during Windows Setup, the OS can download and install apps without asking you for any extra information, but you can still use your Live ID even if you chose to create a local account. Once you’ve purchased an app, you’ll be able to download that app to any Windows 8 or Windows on ARM device you’ve signed into with your Windows Live ID.
All of the preview apps in the Windows Store are currently offered free of charge, but in the RTM version of the store developers will be able to offer both “Buy” and “Try” buttons for apps with demos—apps can have either timed or feature-limited demos available. Unlocking the full version of the app requires no separate download, and all of your saved data from the demo is still available. Info pages for apps also list compatible processor architectures—x86, x64, and ARM.
As seen above, when updates are available a small number will appear on the Windows Store tile. Entering the Store and clicking the "Updates" link in the upper right-hand corner of the screen will present a list of available updates, which you can install individually or all at once.
Apps submitted to the Windows Store have to make it through Microsoft’s approval process, which looks to be a more developer-friendly version of Apple's system: Windows 8 will be a curated platform, which should help curb some of the malware problems that Android is having. However, criteria for approval are clearly laid out, and developers whose apps are rejected will be given feedback on what changes they'll need to make to get approved. Microsoft is also updating its development tools to help guide developers through all the steps of the certification process.
For both advertisements and in-app purchases, Microsoft offers its own platforms but does not mandate their use. If a newspaper or magazine publisher has an existing database of its users and a pre-existing authentication system, that publisher is free to continue using them in its app. Apple began mandating the use of its systems for in-app purchases last year, meaning that all in-app purchases on iOS are subject to Apple’s 70/30 revenue split, and Google may be moving to prohibit third-party in-app purchases even as you read this.
Lastly, let’s assuage the fears of enterprise administrators: via group policies and PowerShell scripts, domain administrators can both permit and deny access to the Windows Store and to individual apps, and can also deploy Metro apps directly to PCs without using the Windows Store at all. This opens the door to volume-licensed apps, and will help IT admins to provide a consistent set of programs and features across different Windows 8 systems.
Whether the Windows Store will succeed remains to be seen—things like app discovery and user interface are important, but in the end the Windows Store is just a portal that will live or die on the quality and quantity of its apps. Those that are available are in a preview state, and while we’ll look at a few of the core Metro apps later on in this article, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to to do in-depth reviews of apps that are in beta-at-best states.
I will lay out one major concern up-front: while apps like Evernote and Cut the Rope do well on smartphones and tablets, I wonder how well more full-featured programs like Photoshop and Office will scale to Metro with their functionality intact. The Windows Store and its WinRT APIs are Microsoft’s future, but take this as a case in point: Microsoft is going to be shipping a copy of Office with every Windows on ARM tablet, but rather than providing Metro versions of Word, Office, PowerPoint, and OneNote to show developers how it’s done, it’s providing copies of those programs that will run only in the desktop environment, and it’s doing this in spite of the fact that no other developers will be able to use the Windows desktop on Windows-powered ARM tablets.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Office apps will never get Metro styling, and it doesn’t mean that developers aren’t going to make some nice, feature-rich Metro apps, but Microsoft’s refusal to eat its own dog food in this case makes me a little nervous about the kind of programs we’ll end up seeing in Metro.
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RavnosCC - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
Very annoying till I went through Microsoft Help and discovered I will not be able to "snap" apps with my standard 4:3, 1280x1024 screen. boofRESHOiL - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
This time around they added a great setting "Make Everything on my Screen Bigger".I didn't have to mess with loading my custom fonts, sizes, DPI, etc. to make my system visible from my couch on my 56" DLP. It did seem to make Metro Apps bigger but not desktop apps or the desktop experience.
Also, I've gone through a ton of small media keyboards and none are as easy as my remote. Since Metro, and all tablet/phone OSes are more geared towards consuming media/data rather than creating it... not saying they can't, but they do better at consuming, I thought for sure they would have accepted windows remote control commands in all the Metro Apps, to my surprise not one does. Of course the arrow keys and OK/Enter key work, but Info, Back, etc have no function in Metro Apps. Just a few changes and Metro becomes the best 10' full OS ever, mainly that it needs to work with remotes. Also, Media Center hasn't changed at all... I think it could use a little Metro and hope it does get it in the final product.
lilmoe - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
I wonder how your video playback batter test would perform with well encoded HD videos with hardware-accelerated playback...I'm sure most of you guys know all about video encoding and decoding... GPU video decoding (my personal experience) consumes a LOT less power than software decoding done on the CPU. Yes, GPUs generally consume more power than the CPU, but it's a lot easier for the GPU to decode Full-HD videos than it is for the CPU (by an order of magnitude), also arguably more efficient.
We all know that hardware-accelerated video players (MPC-HC and Windows Media Player included) support that feature. But you never mentioned if it was enabled in your setup. So I'm assuming you didn't use any sort of HW Acceleration, and therefore, you had 2 or more cores of your test setups running in each test for decoding the video while playing the videos.
On my HP DV6 Core2Due T6400 laptop, properly encoded MP4 videos run with almost 0% of CPU utilization, and with the right codec (I use the FFDShow with DirectX Video Acceleration) even high profile MKV files run with 5-15% cpu utilization (otherwise 50-100% of CPU utilization. I use Windows Media Player since it doesn't utilize as much CPU power as MPC-HC.
My laptop stays 2-2.5 hours on battery if i'm using software decoding, but lasts well above 3.5 hours with HW-Acceleration enabled... I wonder how that will affect your setup?
mutatio - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
I'm glad the reviewers found some redeeming qualities to the OS. All I can say is that I was not impressed with MS' mobile OS. It's strong in concept but just tacky in appearance, like some city traffic symbol maker was in charge of the design. Windows 8 does no better IMHO and this honestly looks like a crap sandwich waiting to blow up in MS' face. Serious? "It's very useful once you learn all of the 50+ new keyboard commands!" You have to be kidding me. I know you all are hardcore nerds here working at Anandtech but there is a reason W8 is getting slapped silly in the consumer oriented reviews. I saw a review the other day that quite literally said, "I enjoyed the review of Windows 8 so much I order a 21" iMac." Tempered indeed.FuzzDad - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
No issues with SLI, my watercooling programs...my configs for gaming...the install went solid. I have a mouse locking problem with Logitech keyboards but there's a work-around until they fix it. I didn't like the interface at first (it isn't intuitive) but once you get to the point where you accept Metro=Start Button it all kinda makes sense. I think the GUI is snappy and smooth and it grows on you. I also think they're probably writing off Windows 8 for the desktop/business use...unless they throw the start button on there...and only after that would there be any talk of it going widespread on desktops that have not yet moved to Win7.I think their strategy is simply get back to a three-year release schedule and into the tablet space as quickly as they can. TBH...this OS is as good as Win7 w/new interface...if they had offered the start button as a hard-core option I think all the howling winds we hear now would have been a soft sea breeze.
jabber - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
...who exactly is going to buy a Windows based Tablet?It's way too late surely? It's the Zune all over again.
The Corp bosses will all have iPads so will be pushing to use them in their work surely? The iPhone through this method is now becoming the standard corp phone of choice at the cost of BB.
MS isnt going to get a look in on this one.
I am a Zune Mk1 owner, just in case.
lilmoe - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
you'll be surprised how many people there are who didn't go with the hype and rejected iPads and Android tablets just because they're not "Windows"....What's amazing about this release is the first impression i heard from lots of people who saw it on my laptop. Lots of them said the very same thing: "Wow, Windows now has *windows*! Everything is in front of me an I don't have to look for anything!"... i haven't noticed that myself, but surely, what they said was true.
jabber - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - link
"you'll be surprised how many people there are who didn't go with the hype and rejected iPads and Android tablets just because they're not "Windows"...."Well good luck to the three of you I say.
somedude1234 - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
Great article, the efforts of the whole team come through in the depth and quality of the report and I'm looking forward to reading the follow-up articles.I use Windows 7 every day to get real work done.
I'd appreciate any feedback from the team (or other AT readers) on the following question: Will the UI enhancements in Windows 8 offer any benefit to me? Specifically, is there anything in Win8 that will help me be more productive in my daily use cases?
On my multi-monitor primary workstation I have the Win7 start menu running vertically on the side of one of my monitors. I often have 3 "pages" on my taskbar of windows open between: outlook, word, excel, powerpoint, firefox, PDF files, text files, explorer windows, putty sessions, and skype or MSN chat windows.
In other words, I am doing a lot of multi-tasking and waste a lot of time doing context switches as needed. Even with 2 or more monitors available, I never have enough screen real estate to have all of the various applications and windows open without ever needing to re-arrange all of the windows.
Win7 provided marginal improvements over XP, I especially like the ability to quickly snap a window to the left or right half of a given monitor. I wish MS would have expanded on this to allow me to snap to the top and bottom halves as well.
I've used a number of 3rd party applications over the years to enhance window management, but invariably they end up either being clunky, unstable or requiring so much additional effort to negate the goal of improving productivity.
Does Windows 8 actually add anything to make window management better/easier/faster/more powerful for those of us that are really multi-tasking all day? Metro seems to be completely consumer focused, what about the professional users?
Th-z - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - link
I've tested it, I don't think you'll find improvement for your usage scenario. In fact it can actually slow you down because they remove Start button. If you want to launch normal desktop apps quickly, you basically have to pin them to taskbar from Metro UI, or use the same enabling-Quick Launch bar trick that people use when they went from XP/Vista to Win 7. There are also third party programs such as Start8 that can bring the Start button back.I find it ironic that people have to use third party program for basic functions to circumvent Microsoft's devolution in UI scheme or stubbornness. I have to use a third party program to enable hovering scrolling in different panes in Windows Explorer (it's still not there in Windows 8).
There are so many ways they can improve desktop UI that I can list that would put OS X to shame, and you even suggest the horizontal snap that can improve desktop usage that many people would probably use. Unfortunately, they're too busy toying with Metro UI. I've always thought Microsoft is a company good at software engineering, but bad at user interface.