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
Technically, everything in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is in a non-final preview, but some things obviously need a bit more work than the others—one of these areas is the core set of Metro apps included with the Consumer Preview, all of which carry a prominent APP PREVIEW label. For this reason, we're just taking a limited look at just a few of Microsoft's core Metro apps for now—we'll do a deeper dive when they're finished, but at least for now it doesn't make a lot of sense to do a head-to-head comparison with their counterparts in iOS and Android. That said, let's continue:
Metro’s Mail uses a design that’s very common in email clients: You have accounts/folders in the left, emails in the middle and the selected email in the right-hand-side. The overall design is extremely bare, something you’re not used to in a desktop email client. There aren’t any visible buttons when in accounts/folders view but when you select a certain account or folder, you get buttons for new email, respond and delete. The respond button holds reply, reply all and forward functions inside it. Right-clicking fires up the so-called menu, which allows switching between accounts and folders view, as well as options to move or mark the email or sync your accounts.
The actual text editor offers a bit more power than the rest of the mail client. Once again, the tools are a right-click away but fortunately, the text editor isn’t as limited as other parts of the app. The basic text editing features are present along with some additional email tools. One should also note that the default signature is “Sent from my Windows 8 PC”, which is more or less a direct copy of Apple’s “Sent from my iPhone/iPad” signatures.
What about supported services and protocols? First and foremost, Metro’s Mail client only supports Hotmail, Gmail and Exchange accounts. Yes, you read it right, there is no support for 3rd party POP or IMAP services as of this writing. This is a huge drawback if you use any other services. For example, our AnandTech mail server is IMAP, which means I can’t use my work email with Metro’s Mail client. Of course, it’s possible to auto-forward emails from other services to Hotmail/Gmail, but that’s not a very convenient solution—hopefully this will change in the final version of the app.
Overall, Metro’s Mail client is fairly awkward for desktop use. It makes sense on a tablet with limited screen estate, but even a free email client like Windows Live Mail is way more powerful and usable in desktop environment. It doesn’t seem logical to be constantly right-clicking in order to access the menu when regular desktop email clients have the menu visible at all times. Even simple commands like reply and syncing are buried under a second click, which is just illogical.
Calendar
Metro’s Calendar is similar to Mail: It’s a very scarce app with not much extra. In Mail, this was a bigger issue but a calendar app doesn’t need to be filled with features to do its job.
The design is very basic. The background is grey and event tiles are in bright colors. Weekends show up in darker grey in day and week views, distinguishing them from weekdays.
Navigation is once again hidden behind a right-click, which brings up options for alternating between day, week and month views, as well as option to navigate to today or add a new event. Adding an event can also be done by clicking a tile where you want to schedule the event to. Navigating between days/weeks/months is done by bringing your mouse close to the upper corners and clicking an arrow.
Adding an event has the common tools which are used by many other services. You can add a location, message, reminder and so on. There is an option to select the calendar where you want the event to be added, which is useful if you use different calendars/services for home and work purposes for example.
Service support is the same as Mail’s: Google, Microsoft (via Windows Live), and Exchange. I quickly tried Google and Microsoft and they synced fine. There is a slight delay in Metro’s Calendar so it takes a while before an event shows up. Different colors in the calendar stand for different services – in this case Google is in blue and Microsoft is in green.
Again, it feels odd to be constantly right-clicking in order to navigate in the user interface. There is definitely enough space for day/week/month buttons and personally I would prefer having them visible rather than right-click to access them. Moreover, the lack of list view can be a con if you’re used to using Apple’s calendar applications. Overall the calendar app is alright – there is no yippee effect but it’s mostly functional.
Messaging
Like the other apps we've looked at, Messaging can only access a couple of services at present—Windows Messenger and Facebook, so again it's really best looked at as a demo or proof-of-concept than as a replacement for whatever your favorite IM program is. Messages between parties are laid out in a standard "speech bubble" format, with different colors and arrows to differentiate the parties who are sending messages.
As a side note, Messaging is actually a really good example of the kind of app that works really well with Metro Snap—it takes up just the right amount of space on the side of your screen, and even on a 1366x768 display you still have enough room to use desktop apps comfortably. Someone make a Twitter client that works like this soon, OK?
People
The Metro People app serves more or less as an aggregator for all of your contacts from different services, including Facebook, Hotmail, Twitter, Google, Exchange, and others. You can tie People to these accounts directly from the app, and it will also pull data from accounts you've set up through other apps (like Messaging, Mail, and etc.). It can also aggregate status updates from various social networking services under its "What's new" heading.
Photos
There is a very basic photo viewer included in Metro. Don’t expect anything fancy, all it does is view your photos. Supported services are the local pictures folder (obviously), Facebook, SkyDrive and Flickr. Once you enter your credentials, all of the photos show up in the now-familiar Metro-style grid of tiles [Editor's note: Kristian had problems getting SkyDrive and Flickr working, but this may be due to his geographical location—both services work fine for me here in the US].
The menu has four tiles, one for each service. Click a tile and the selected service opens. Right-clicking doesn’t bring any extra features here in the main menu.
Once you open a service, it shows you the photos and possible folders. I created a test Facebook account and uploaded a few pics from our recent reviews, and they all show up fine. Unfortunately, Photos doesn’t show Facebook photos where you were tagged, so it’s limited to photos uploaded to your account.
Inside an actual photo folder, you can play a regular slide show of the pictures or view them separately. Pictures library allows deletion and browsing by date as well, and Facebook has an option to view the photo in Facebook.
Metro’s Photos is very tablet-like and once again screams for touch input. It’s usable with a mouse but there are better photo viewing applications which are a lot more powerful as well in terms of features (editing, organizing, etc.). This time the service support is at least decent and Photos is indeed more than just a shortcut to your pictures folder.
Camera
Windows 8 includes a basic camera app that can be used to take pictures with your device's built-in camera—snapshots are saved in your Pictures library by default. The app has basic settings for setting camera resolution, controlling brightness, and other settings—it’s not going to turn a crappy webcam into an SLR, but it’s nice to see Windows finally get a functional native camera app.
Conclusions
The finished versions of these apps may be entirely different than the evaluation versions that Microsoft is showing off in the Consumer Preview, but even in their current form they give us an idea of how Windows 8 is going to approach the problem of vendor lock-in.
It seems like all of the major players in the tablet market—Google, Apple, and most recently Amazon—are using their hardware and software to lock the user into their respective ecosystems. Apple's iCloud offers easy setup and syncing for Apple mail, calendar, and other services; Google has built everything from an email service to a social network in an effort to get you to spend all of your time on its pages; and the Kindle Fire is purpose-built to purchase items from Amazon's stores. It can make interoperability difficult, and the longer you live in a given ecosystem, the more painful it can be to jump ship.
This is not to say that Microsoft doesn't offer you the option of lock-in: all settings are synced via your Windows Live ID, which is also needed to download apps, and it can also tie you to Hotmail, SkyDrive, Messenger, and any number of Microsoft-hosted services—they are trying to run a business here. The difference in Windows 8 is that you can also access data on the services that you're already using, and have data from those services treated the same way as data hosted by Microsoft. It's convenient and, most importantly, it presents a consistent user experience no matter where your stuff is coming from.
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yannigr - Thursday, March 15, 2012 - link
May I say something here?Sorry for my English in advance.
I don't know if your work at Anandtech is a full time job or more like an occasional work. When you see a site like Anandtech you think that this is more like a big company with full time employees not a site with people that come and go just to write an article, or a review, at their spare time with hardware that they buy or if they are lucky get from the big companies as a gift for a presentation/review.
So when you are thinking Anandtech (and this is where maybe we misjudge you) as a big company you don't expect to read stuff that you read from a 16 years old kid in a small forum with 2-5-10 thousand members about his last review. I can not accept an excuse like this that you give. If you are in the BIGGEST and MORE RESPECTED hardware review site on the internet, and I don't think I am wrong here, you buy hardware that you also DO NOT LIKE or is not good enough for YOU. Why? Because that is your job or/and because you are writing for ANANDTECH not YannigrTech.
When you have the time to fast-test 8 machines you try to find an AMD system and even if it exists a system with VIA hardware. I know I must be joking with the last one about VIA. Well, I am not. I do think that if there was a VIA system in there many would be posting about how they were surprised about that. Even if they where laughing at it's performance it would have been a plus for the review.
Think a review many pages long about the next 3DMark only with AMD gpus because the reviewer don't find Nvidia gpus good enough. Many Nvidia fans would have been disappointed, to put it mildly.
Anyway the first post was written just for fun, because I know that Intel don't only have the better hardware but also the biggest influence not only at hardware sites but in people's minds too. Between two equal systems most just choose Intel because it is an Intel.
This post was whiten only because I was not expecting someone that writes for Anandtech to say that:
I only have Intel, I am not buying AMD because it is just not good enough for me.
Last. Thanks for the review. No joking here. It was interested and useful.
Andrew.a.cunningham - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
First, thanks for reading! I'm glad you found the review useful. Second, I want to try to answer some of your questions as to how AnandTech (and most new outlets on the Internet) work.Most writers who get paid are not working full-time positions. This is true both of independently owned websites like AnandTech, corporate-owned sites like IGN, or even big-time traditional publications like the New York Times. Most sites will contract freelancers rather than full-time workers both because of cost (freelancers are almost universally paid less than salaried employees and get no benefits) and administrative reasons (full-time employees mean that you've got to start paying attention to things like benefits and payroll taxes, necessitating a larger administrative staff to handle things like accounting).
Different outlets handle things in different ways - at AnandTech, the pay is OK for contractors, and most of us can bother Anand himself if we have questions about a story we're working on. On other sites (to cherry-pick an extreme example, let's call out the Huffington Post), freelancers are sometimes paid nothing, and are rather compensated with "exposure" and clips that they could in theory use to land a paying gig later on. I think what HuffPo (and, really, any profitable publication that doesn't pay its writers) does is a scam and I've got some strong feelings about it, but that's not my main point - my point is that much of what you read on the Internet is being written by people who don't write on the Internet full time. At AnandTech, even the senior editors are contracted freelancers rather than full-time employees.
Different people write for different reasons, but my goal is to make a living at it - I'm doing it because I love it, sure, but I'm also doing it because there are bills to pay. To do that, I cannot and will not spend $500 on hardware to use in a review that will earn me quite a bit less than $500. As anyone can tell you, that math doesn't add up, and since this is a review of the beta version of an x86-compatible Windows product - a product that looks and acts the same on any hardware that meets the minimum requirements - it's frankly not as important as a few of you seem to think it is. And that's all I have to say about it.
yannigr - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
I still believe that you should buy an AMD system. Not today or tomorrow but the next time you would need an extra machine. But that's me.Thanks for answering my post :-)
Andrew.a.cunningham - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
I'll look into it for sure. Trinity has my interest piqued. :-)TC2 - Sunday, March 11, 2012 - link
AMD?This isn't the point! Andrew Cunningham here hasn't downside. I want to ask, what is the problem here? The recent Intel CPUs a far superior than the amd cpus! And, if you want to know the best sides of W8 ... the amd just isn't the first choice ... :)))
silverblue - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
At the time Andrew got those machines, the best option across the board likely would've been Intel. The Atom build is thoroughly outclassed by Brazos but it simply wasn't available at the time.It's only really the past twelve months to fifteen months where AMD has actually had a viable range of mobile processors for netbooks and larger.
medi01 - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
Name something "far superior" to AMD A8 3850 that has comparable cost.TC2 - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - link
Oops to daisies :) It would make a god to tears!You and all amd-fans, are very funny!
When the conversation is about cores - "amd has twice than Intel" ?!
When the conversation is about performance - "the cost isn't comparable" ?!
When the conversation is about CPU - "amds APU is bla-bla..." ?!
When the conversation is about benchmarks - "look look, the BD is almost like Nehalem (btw. 2 generations older)" ?!
All those is UNTRUE!!! And remember well - I and many-many people doesn't give a shit about amds green presentations, cores and so ... We need fast CPU in ST as well as MT, and fast GPU! And believe me, esp. in professional segment amd got nothing significant :)))
chucky2 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I'd like for you to do an article on feature support of DirectX 9 cards under say Windows XP SP3 vs Windows 8. I know AMD dropped support for their DirectX 9 based cards before their 10.2 (Feb 2010 driver set), and then later belatedly added 10.2 as the last supported driver. My interest is in if they've dropped proper support of their cards in Vista/7/and now 8 rather than putting in the (very likely minimal) work to properly support them.Thanks for the article!
Andrew.a.cunningham - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
The 10.2 driver was only supported under Vista, but in my experience it works fine for Windows 7, which means it should work OK in Windows 8. One of the iMacs I tested on used a Radeon X1600 Mobility card - I installed the Vista-certified driver off of a Snow Leopard DVD and didn't see any crashes or instability, but your mileage may vary.