The Windows RT Review
by Vivek Gowri & Anand Lal Shimpi on October 25, 2012 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Windows RT
- Operating Systems
- Microsoft
- Mobile
- Windows 8
- Tablets
Bridging the Gap, the Dichotomy of Windows RT
by Anand Shimpi
I described Windows RT as being a tablet OS with all of the underlying Windows-ness of Windows. You can get the big full screen app experience in tablet mode, but poke around your file system with Explorer or use Office 2013 like you would on a traditional notebook if you want to. If the two sides of Windows RT remained fairly separate that’d be one thing, unfortunately there are some dependencies between the two sides of the OS that keep the overall user experience from being as friendly as it is in iOS. There are still occasional reminders that you’re dealing with something that’s distinctly Windows here.
Most mobile OSes have done their best to hide the underlying file system and shell from the end user. Microsoft did, in my opinion, the smart thing and avoided hiding its roots with Windows RT. Although the new Start Screen is the default UI for Windows RT, there’s a big desktop tile front and center that will take you back to something far more familiar:
Unlike the Windows 8 desktop, you’re pretty limited in what you can do here. The only applications that are allowed to run in desktop mode under Windows RT are Explorer, IE10, Office 2013 and the command prompt (there are also all of the Windows specific tools and settings which I’ll get to shortly). Developers cannot make applications for Windows RT desktop mode and you can’t sideload anything here. Microsoft’s belief is that by completely locking down the system, requiring that applications only come from the Windows Store, it can avoid the pitfalls of viruses and malware that can plague Windows machines today.
Steve Sinofsky famously quoted an analyst when they asked if Windows RT would be backwards compatible with all of the legacy Windows viruses and spyware. The answer was an astounding no, and this is exactly why we can’t have open season on Windows RT desktop development. There’s also the obvious financial angle to all of this. Microsoft takes a cut of any apps sold through the Windows Store.
Coming from the perspective of a traditional Windows user, the lack of flexibility on the desktop seems wrong. From the perspective of the rest of the ARM based tablet space, it’s not a big deal. At least Windows RT gives you direct, first party access to the file system. There’s very little exposed through iOS, and with Android you need to download a third party app to get access to the file system.
Explorer works just as it would on a Windows 8 PC. The folder structure is exactly as you would expect it on any Windows machine. There are even some x86 remnants in the Windows RT install such as a C:\Windows\SysWOW64 directory complete with x86 binaries inside that obviously won’t run on your Windows RT tablet.
Internet Explorer in desktop mode works just like a traditional IE windows application would work. The desktop app actually controls settings and features for the Metro...err...fancy IE10. For example, if you want to change security settings, clear your history or empty your cache, you have to do all of these things from the IE10 desktop application. Fancy IE10 doesn’t expose them.
The command prompt is, well, a command prompt. It features all of the same commands that you could run before, although once again you can’t simply drop an x86 exe on your system and run it. Not having binary compatibility can be frustrating at times.
Although developers can’t build applications for Windows RT’s desktop, you can write and execute batch files. Keep in mind that if your batch file needs any additional support files (e.g. sleep.exe) you’ll need ARM versions of them which, unless they come from Microsoft, just isn’t happening.
As I mentioned earlier, there are a few other things you can run and do in RT’s desktop mode. Control Panel, event viewer, disk management and all of the other administrative tools that you’d expect to come with Windows are present in Windows RT (including regedit). There are also the little apps that Microsoft has always included, which also work in desktop mode (e.g. mspaint, calc, notepad, etc...)
Ultimately Windows RT is an ARM version of Windows with tablet makeup on. You still get all of the normal bits and pieces of Windows, minus some flexibility and of course, backwards compatibility.
For years we’ve been asking Microsoft to make a clean break with its legacy code and introduce a version of Windows that was built from scratch, with only support for the latest hardware. With Windows RT, Microsoft finally delivered some of that, but in a sort of weird, backwards way.
As Windows RT only supports the ARMv7 instruction set architecture, none of your old x86 applications will run on the platform. Microsoft hoped to avoid this being a problem by shipping an ARM version of Office 2013 Home & Student Edition with Windows RT tablets, and by directing users at the Windows Store for the rest of their application needs. Although it would’ve been possible for Microsoft to enable x86 compatibility through emulation or binary translation, performance would’ve likely been pretty bad.
The loss of backwards compatibility with years of Windows applications feels wrong, but from Microsoft's perspective you don't get that with iOS and Android so there's no real competitive disadvantage here. Why bother with an ARM based version of Windows to begin with? To bring competition to Intel and ensure that it will be able to deliver Windows to the new wave of ultra mobile devices (e.g. tablets). Intel hasn't been competitive on power or pricing at the low end (read: Atom) of the spectrum for years now. The introduction of Windows RT changed that. Atom Z2760 (Clovertrail) is around half the price of the cheapest Atom CPU of the past five years, and it's price competitive with solutions from Qualcomm. We have Windows RT to thank for that. Without pressure from ARM, Clovertrail would've started around $50 per chip just like Intel's low end parts had in the past. As AMD is no longer a pricing check for Intel in some of these new markets, Microsoft had to look for a new way to offer balance. Supporting ARM is its way of doing that. Until there's a new pricing/power/performance x86 competitor to Intel in tablets, ARM and Windows RT will remain.
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steven75 - Friday, November 2, 2012 - link
iPad 4-finger swipe is pretty damn fast. I'm not sure how it could be faster.eaanders22 - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link
Microsoft has managed to clutter up what could have been a decent tablet with remnants of an aging operating system. Can you imagine Apple putting a few hooks to the OSX desktop into its iOS tablets that don't give much of the functionality of OSX? A DOS prompt in a tablet, give me a break!Let's face it. Tablets are basically big phone technology. They're not computers in any real sense. Apple recognized this. They had a successful phone and they configured a tablet from it. Doing any significant input or serious analysis on a phone or tablet is a non-starter. You need a decent keyboard and special purpose software for many different kinds of tasks a full blown computer can do.
There is a third approach. Windows and OSX have become beasts of the tech world with complicated user interfaces to give the flexibility and power to do complicated tasks. An alternative to the phone/tablet approach, which is basic output only driven, are devices like the Chromebook which relieve casual users of burden of complexity by doing most of the work in the cloud. This dramatically reduces the learning curve for new users and frees them of the busy work of backups, updates, and security considerations. It can mean cheap, light weight systems with no moving parts that perform both input and output in the simplest possible way. Novice users are put off by the complexity of full blown computers and even by the complexity of modern smartphones and tablets.
Microsoft could have been successful by keeping RT a tablet version of Windows Phone and coming out with a web based verson of Windows like Chromebook. These devices haven't taken off like tablets due to the fact that the user experience with phones easily transferred to tablets, while Google didn't have a base in the full blown computer world to build on. But, there is an audience out there, particularly new users and older users that are tired of putting up with the complexity, lag, and busywork associated with bloated full blown operating systems they don't need to do a little writing, emailing, and multimedia watching. The new $249 Samsung Chromebook that just came out sold out everywhere in a couple days. The new RT devices are twice as costly and twice as complicated to get up to speed on for people looking to continue their quite simple use of a computer for a little emaling, writing, and multimedia watching. Who needs a touch screen for that. It just gets in the way.
The Windows 8 systems are another story. There you get full computing power and the functionality of a tablet in one package. This will fit a wide audience of sophisticated computer and smartphone users.
Dorek - Friday, November 2, 2012 - link
"A DOS prompt in a tablet, give me a break!"Uh, I think it's awesome. It lets you do a lot that iOS could never, ever do.
Chromebooks are never giong to take off. Can you even sync an iPod to a Chromebook?
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link
Eventually someone is going to release either a compiler or binary translator or emulator or something that lets you convert a visual studio project to RT. Or even run the x86 executable itself. Right? I should be able to compile my own sleep.exe and launch it from a batch file. How can they stop that, and why would they?andrewaggb - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link
They might require all apps to be signed to be run. Any apps in the store could be signed by them and any apps that come with windows could be.It would really make it hard to get viruses etc but it would also stop compiling your own without going through the store.
I don't really know what measures are active though.
Jugklutzz - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link
Hey Guys. Great review.Tablets play a huge base in cloud base storage. What are the options for mounting a NAS?
Best Regards,
Mike
mattlach - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link
RT does nothing for me.Main reason I have not bought a tablet is because of both Android and iOS not being able to run full featured desktop software.
To me the brilliance of Windows 8 is what it does for x86 tablets, that can be both for full desktop use AND tablet use.
We don't need another limited tablet OS like Android and iOS. RT Is a complete waste IMHO.
THizzle7XU - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link
"If you’re really concerned about the state of third-party apps, you just have to wait and see. I’ve seen a lot of snap judgements made about Windows RT in the last couple of days based on the dearth of good applications in Windows Store, and while I agree with that sentiment, I feel like it’s extremely shortsighted to write off the ecosystem already. Neither version of the OS has gone on sale yet, and we know that there are a number of applications that will go live on the official release date, as well as many more coming in the weeks ahead."Exactly what I was thinking when reading the complaints on The Verge and some other sites. They claim there are no apps, and I'm thinking...well, technically there is no Windows RT yet for anyone because it's not out yet! And as a developer, I know how they think. Why release something earlier than you have to? You want as much time as possible to work on code and QA. If no one but some media and beta testers don't have the OS yet, what's the rush to release a version 1.0 app? So these sensationalist pseudo-tech editors can rip your early app apart too?
nofumble62 - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link
Apps launch time is too slow for my patience.Haswell convertible laptop would be a killer.
Tablet and laptop will converge next year.
gsurath - Friday, October 26, 2012 - link
Fantastic review. From this point of view I can now clearly see corporate boardrooms across the world with RT based tablets sitting on the desks. I can see people carrying them all around the office. I think that is where RT will win big. I see corporates creating their own RT apps for employees to access. This review along with Anand's on Surface reconfirms to me that Windows has just paved the way to dominate the office market for a few years to come. Will this mean that people will then use this single device across all their needs? No so sure given the number of gadgets we tend to collect, I still think will find a space. With Office 2013 for ARM being made available, Android too will have the capabilities of RT in the future. All in all, the future is interesting.