The Technolon – Tech News and Opinion

Its been a few weeks since Windows 8 was released to developers to start building apps and to try out. I have had a few weeks to use it and have had time to have a pretty good feel for the new OS, so here is my review.

The first thing you’ll notice if your a Windows faithful is the totally new UI. This UI is known as “metro” and is very similar to the interface you would find on Windows Phone 7. At first this UI is going to seem totally foreign and weird, but after playing with it for a while you will notice it is not that different from the Windows you know and love. On the bottom left of the picture that is added you will notice there is an icon that looks like a Windows 7 desktop. This is because, while it is a Windows 7 desktop.

This Windows 7 like interface feels just the same as running Windows 7, but the main difference is once you click the start button you are taken back to the metro interface. This interface includes live tile images for things like weather, news, and twitter. This metro interface is the big change in the Windows 8 UI.

Windows 8 is trying to take the Apple style approach of adding apps into an app store so you can conveniently access them. So far, in the developers preview the app store is not available, but Microsoft does include some preinstalled apps to play around with in this build. There are some games installed and essential apps like weather, news, twitter, a Facebook client, and stocks. All these apps from the metro interface run in full screen including the new build of Internet Explorer which is tested to be as fast as Google’s Chrome Browser.

The full screen apps add to the experience of this new OS and really allows you to immerse yourself in the content. The apps seem to run well and are very snappy. (Apps Above)

I have been running the developers build of Windows 8 on an HP Mini 210-1000. To this point it doesn’t seem like a beta at all! I have encountered no issues running it and it seems like a final release. Having said that, the performance on an Intel Atom processor is incredible! It is smooth and very snappy. It makes it feel like an Intel Core i7 processor. This just might be able to save the slowly fading netbook market.

Having used this OS for about two weeks or so, its no secrete it is very tablet optimized. Windows 8 seems almost made from the ground up specifically for tablets. This makes the performance seem a little odd at first, but I think most will be able to adjust to the interface on a PC.

Microsoft has taken an interesting approach with Windows 8 trying to make an OS for all devices; tablets, smartphones, and PC’s. It will be interesting to see how people respond to this one operating system approach.

Overall my experience has been very good with this OS. I think it is defiantly a big improvement for which Microsoft desperately needed to respond to the involving Apple market. This is a great contender to take on Mac OSX Lion and I think most people will be satisfied with this upgrade.