Review: Windows 8

by Tech2 last updated on October 31, 2012 at 12:01 pm

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Photo: Tech2]Microsoft, often accused of being unable to anticipate or respond to people's changing needs, has decided it's time to do something dramatic. Traditional desktop and notebook PC sales have stagnated over the past year or so, while over a hundred million iPads alone have sold in the same time. The threat is no longer OS X or Linux, but an entirely new category of devices. Faced with the prospect of becoming somewhat irrelevant, Microsoft has decided to prioritise touchscreens over mice and portability over power. Windows 8 could be the biggest risk the company has ever taken, and for better or for worse, there are no half measures anywhere. We've spent the last six months using Microsoft's official previews as well as the final version of Windows 8, which was released to manufacturers in August. We've also been able to spend a few weeks with a Samsung XE700T1A tablet running Windows 8 to get an understanding of how it works on such a device.By now, the look of the "Modern" user interface (formerly named Metro) is quite familiar to us. The Start screen, with its big flashing tiles and stark colours, was first unveiled over a year ago. Members of the press and public have been able to use beta versions of the new OS for at least six months now. Even so, it takes a lot of time before it will feel natural. It's hard to give up on 17 years of learnt behaviour and habit, but we've tried not to hold this against Windows 8 for the purpose of evaluating it on its own merits.When we previewed the Consumer Release version earlier this year, we were left with the impression that Microsoft was trying its hardest to do justice to its new ideas without the risk of alienating the massive Windows user base. It seemed as though users would be trapped between two worlds, primarily because the Modern UI and apps were just not enough to satisfy anyone who wanted to be productive or multitask the way they've been used to all along. Since that time, Microsoft has improved the quality and functionality of the built-in apps and many more viable ones have made appearances in the Windows Store.Getting StartedInstalling Windows 8 is surprisingly quick and painless. Downloading it from Microsoft's website is the primary new method of distribution, which makes sense in an age of slim laptops without DVD drives. If you're installing on top of an existing version of Windows, you'll have to run through a compatibility checker which will let you know if any software or hardware might not work smoothly. One important thing to note is you'll need to type in your product key before the installation actually begins.Windows 8 is designed to be tied to an online account. Any Microsoft account will do, including your Hotmail, Windows Live, Xbox Live, Passport or MSN which are all now known as Microsoft Accounts. Keep in mind that everything associated with that ID, most likely an email account but also possibly your links to Facebook, etc, will end up integrated into the Windows 8 environment. You'll also use this ID to access the Windows Store, which means saving your credit card details somewhere down the line. You'll also most likely end up using SkyDrive a lot more. For those reasons, you'll want to use a very strong, unique password even though it will make logging into your computer multiple times a day more annoying than it should be. If you're worried about privacy or the security of anything in your online accounts, it's probably a good idea to create a fresh ID.You can still choose to use Windows 8 offline, though apps will then constantly remind you to sign in or risk living without various features. You'll also have to use separate work and personal accounts if you use the same device everywhere.Whether or not you use a Microsoft account, you have the option of signing in with a "Picture Password". This involves choosing any image and then defining taps, circles or sliding gestures over it. You have to create a sequence of three gestures and then repeat them each time to log in. A Picture Password could be great for many people, especially on a tablet or PC with a touchscreen and no physical keyboard. On the downside, watching someone perform these gestures and then repeating them to gain access to their computer is child's play.As your account is being set up, you'll be led through a short animated sequence that attempts to explain some of Windows' new conventions, including the Start screen, gestures and the Charms bar. What confused us was that the instructions involved a mix of tapping, clicking, pointing, dragging and swiping but no direction as to when each action is appropriate. It would have been better if Windows had been able to detect the presence or absence of a touchscreen and then display appropriate tips.The Start screenNevertheless, you get your first glimpse of the Start screen only a short while later, and there are no further instructions. You might notice a few of the tiles are "alive", since your email, Facebook contacts, SkyDrive photos, Xbox Live details, etc will automatically become associated with their respective apps. Most of the tiles, however, are deceptively static. They'll spring to life after the first time you use their apps, which means your Start screen could soon become overwhelming with constant animations announcing the latest news, sports scores, stock market levels, and weather. As you add more apps from the Windows store, things get much more cluttered and distracting—often too distracting. Again, those with privacy concerns should be warned that their personal information could be splashed across the screen at any moment—including many things that you have no control over, such as your friends' potentially raunchy contact photos, unsolicited email attachments, and the contents of chat messages. Games, including Microsoft's own, display cheery little messages about achievements you should try to unlock and new levels you can purchase, which borders on advertising and is especially annoying. You can't turn this behaviour off entirely and you can't choose certain photos, email accounts or contacts to suppress, but you can right-click (or tap and hold) on each tile individually to bring up the option to disable animation.But tiles aren't just for launching programs. You can "pin" lots of things to the Start screen—individual people's contacts, individual stages of games, individual photos, a news channel, etc. We initially found this handy, in the sense that frequently used items could be reached right from our Start screen. However as our collection of apps grew, the tiles just got lost in a crowd. Typing anything on the keyboard begins a very quick search, so you can also get to apps, documents or preference panes by typing the first few letters of their names.App tiles on the Start screen can be dragged and dropped around, and you can give each chunk a name. You can't, however, sort tiles by name, date, group, etc., and you can't rearrange groups as a whole. It quickly becomes difficult to locate an app when you have dozens of animated tiles which rarely look the same. And although this screen replaces the Start menu, you won't find shortcuts to Windows' built-in accessories such as Paint and Notepad, or even a shortcut to the Control Panel. For those, you'll have to right-click (or swipe in from the bottom or top) to see a hidden "All apps" button. The screen that pops up has an alphabetical listing of your app tiles as well as a folder-wise list of the phantom Start menu's contents. You can pin any of these shortcuts to the Start screen if you like, or begin typing to search. Here, one of the main differences between Windows 8 on a desktop and Windows 8 on a tablet manifests itself. It felt quite natural and smooth to flick the tablet screen horizontally to jump to a particular tile, but scrolling vertically with the mouse wheel made little sense and the repetitive motion got tiresome quickly. Our tablet's 11-inch 1388x768 16:9 screen showed tiles in three long rows, whereas our desktop's 18.5-inch screen at the same resolution and aspect ratio displayed four rows. Swapping in a 24-inch high-def 16:10 monitor yielded six short rows, which made things easier (but brought with it a fresh set of problems, which we'll get to).If all new app tiles weren't pinned to the Start screen by default and if this menu was more easily accessible (much like the home screens and full menus on many smartphones), Windows 8's Modern UI would be much easier to deal with.We didn't realise it at first, but the account name in the upper-right corner is clickable. Most likely inspired by many of today's websites, this is where you go to change account details or "sign out" (the new terminology for logging out or switching users). Incidentally, there's no clock or notification area for common controls such as checking network status or ejecting a USB device. Live tiles are meant to show you what you need to know, and pop-up notifications display alerts and transient information, but then they're gone.CharmsAfter the Start screen, the next big change in Windows 8 is the use of Charms. Swiping in from the right edge of a touchscreen, flicking your cursor to the top- or bottom-right corners, or hitting [Win]+[C] on your keyboard brings up the Charms bar on the right (plus a huge clock and a few notification icons in a non-intuitive patch on the bottom left—so that's where they've been moved to!). Bang in the middle is a Windows button which brings up the Start screen, just like the one on your keyboard or tablet bezel. Charms are mostly context-dependent, so their function will vary depending on what you're doing. 'Search' on the Start screen will default to showing apps as results, while within apps it will default to whatever they specify. This is also the new system-wide Find function, and can be called up from anywhere using [Win]+[F

. The second Charm, called 'Share', is completely new to Windows 8. App developers can build sharing capabilities, known internally as "contracts" into apps which never even see each other. For example, this will let you post something to Twitter or Facebook, send it as an email, or anything else an app developer might think of. Sharing options are a bit sparse at the moment, but traction will grow. The 'Devices' Charm is where you'll find entries for your printers, projectors and potentially other peripherals. Last, the 'Settings' Charm contains system-wide controls for brightness, volume, Wi-Fi and shutting down or restarting your PC. This is also where you're supposed to go to for app-specific settings, but many apps still just simply have an 'Options' button or something similar and those that don't rarely point you to the Charms bar. There isn't much consistency in this behaviour, at least not yet.

Which brings us to Windows 8's biggest consistency problem: Settings. The Charms bar lets you see and adjust some things, but it's painfully limited. There's also a shortcut to a PC Settings app which contains a small set of preferences, some of which are specific to the Modern UI and some of which are system-wide in scope. This does not replace or even supplement the usual Windows Control Panel; in fact you often have to jump back and forth between the two worlds. For example, it's easy enough to connect to a Wi-Fi network through the Charms bar, but if the network happens to require a static IP address, you need to fire up the old Network and Sharing Center. You can change some user preferences, but administrative tools are only in the Control Panel. This is incredibly fidgety and completely shatters any impression we had that the Modern UI was a self-sufficient environment capable of providing an iPad-like experience for beginners or casual users. As tablet users, we were frustrated by the need to use dialogue boxes that haven't changed since Windows 95 with a touchscreen and soft keyboard. This is also where the "Classic desktop as an app" metaphor gets smashed—you have to dive in there to make system-wide settings, which should not make sense.

Life with apps
So what exactly are apps, and why do we need them anyway? "Apps" isn't just the fashionable new name for software applications, but almost defines a class of applications that are less capable and more gimmicky than traditional software. Apps sit somewhere between desktop widgets—those amusing, single-purpose things that used to float around on our desktops till we got bored of them—and full-fledged software. Apps could be individual websites, such as a news or weather service, which are nothing but wrappers around fresh content streamed from the Web. They could also be little games and utilities, such as currency converters and stopwatches. More likely than that, they serve individual purposes such as chatting, social networking, streaming audio or video, or looking something up. Many of today's apps are like websites at best and like multimedia CD-ROMs (remember those?) at worst. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since a huge proportion of our time in front of a computer these days is spent within a Web browser.

Apps in Windows 8 are also defined by their look and behaviour. For one, they all run full-screen. There's no title bar, no menu bar, no border, and no layout convention. Most interface elements are hidden till you right-click or swipe in from the top or bottom of your touchscreen, at which point bars along the top and/or bottom appear with options. Windows 8 encourages horizontal scrolling, and you'll see this used gratuitously within apps. There's a lot of oversized text, and yes, there are bland squares everywhere.

Microsoft bundles a number of apps with Windows 8 which are not equivalent to anything found in previous versions of the OS. For starters there are the News, Sports and Business apps which are fairly self-explanatory in purpose and function. Search pulls up a huge Bing interface, and the Maps and Travel apps are also unsurprisingly powered by Microsoft's in-house online service. Music and Video are tied into the new Xbox services which aren't available in India yet, so users here will have to do with adding their own locally stored files (our test PC allowed us to browse through music and video selections but then choked if we tried to stream or purchase anything). Games is tied to your Xbox Live profile, and lets you browse through games you can play on your PC. A separate standalone app called SmartGlass, which is far more interesting, lets you control an Xbox via your home network, with the tantalizing promise of using a tablet as a game controller and playing cross-platform in the future.

The most interesting and useful built-in apps are Mail, Messaging, Contacts and Calendar. Mail is a rather stripped-down client which looks much like the recently launched Outlook.com. It's light on features for sorting and managing mail, but should suffice for most casual users. In comparison to a bloated, complicated beast like Microsoft Outlook, this might actually be a good thing. Calendar syncs to your online service of choice. Contacts and Messaging are highly intertwined and socially integrated. Contacts is the center of activity, with a huge list of all your friends from synced services including Facebook, Twitter, your email accounts, and most likely your phone, if it's synced to any of these. Like most apps that attempt to combine services, you end up with a huge list of people, many of whom you don't necessarily need to keep in touch with. You also end up mixing contacts from work and your personal life; some of which are only email addresses and some of which are only phone numbers. The Contacts app further integrates Facebook and Twitter updates, so you can click on a contact to see their profile, photos and updates. Messaging isn't your typical chat program with a contact list. Instead, you need to dip into the Contacts app to find a person, and can then chat with them. You won't know whether you're chatting via Facebook or MSN unless you choose the contact carefully. The downside to this is that you're permanently signed in to Facebook chat, even if you don't want to be. Incoming messages might come to you through the app, your phone, and/or Facebook in your browser.

Finally, the Photos app combines views of photos in your Facebook account, SkyDrive, Flickr, and hard drive. You'll have to turn each service off if you don't want it. Photos is the default viewer for all image formats, so even if you're in the Desktop environment, opening a file will throw you into the Metro app. Windows Picture Viewer is still around though, and you can re-associate it with image files. Similarly, there's a PDF viewer called Reader (which isn't pinned to the Start screen) which takes over PDF duties. It's nice to have a built-in app, but Reader lays pages and spreads out in—what else—horizontal rows, which is extremely disconcerting.

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