Windows 8 (for tablets and touchscreen devices) review

This is an abridged version of the full nine-page review of Windows 8 that will appear in issue 217 of PC Pro, on sale 13 September

It’s only three years since Windows 7 hit the scene – but a lot has changed in that time. Back in 2009, there was no such thing as an iPad. Today, Apple and Android tablets are everywhere – and they’re being used not merely as entertainment platforms, but increasingly as serious productivity tools. As hardware manufacturers and application developers throw their weight behind mobile devices, Microsoft needs to do something big, or it risks being left behind.

Windows 8 is that something: a new conception of the operating system that’s designed to make the most of tablets and multi-touch enabled laptops now, and pave the way for the future of touch-based form factors.

Gestures and Metro

The big question is: has Microsoft finally cracked it? Well, on first impressions, it certainly looks that way. It starts with the lock screen, which by default is dragged up with a finger to unlock. There’s nothing particularly exciting there, but Windows 8 takes advantage of touch to introduce a new kind of password technology – one that sees users drawing patterns on screen instead of typing. This works brilliantly, and provides a quick way to unlock the tablet that’s also highly secure.

Once you’re in, you’ll quickly find that Windows 8 isn’t like its rivals iOS and Android at all. There’s a continuous horizontal stream of Live Tiles, which can be navigated with a quick, single flick right or left. Tapping a tile launches an app, and a pinch zooms the view right out, allowing quick navigation of long start screens.

This tile-based interface was originally codenamed “Metro” – something that’ll be entirely familiar to Windows Phone users – but following a trademark infringement complaint, Microsoft is set to rebrand the user interface. For now, however, we’ll continue to use “Metro” to refer to the OS and its various apps and features.

As ever with touch systems, there’s a host of core gestures you need to know to make the most of Windows 8’s touch experience. The OS supports up to ten simultaneous touch points, which opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, but despite this, there aren’t any four- and five-fingered gestures in the vein of OS X’s gesture controls.

Instead, Windows 8’s tertiary touch controls are launched by dragging a thumb or finger in from the area surrounding the screen towards its centre (or, in the case of laptops equipped with a multi-touch touchpad, dragging a finger in from the touchpad’s edges).

Swiping in from the right edge launches the Charms menu. The Charms provide access to Windows 8’s search mechanism, its context-based Share facility, a Start button that takes you back to the Metro start screen, and Devices and Settings shortcuts.

Swiping a single finger from the top or bottom brings up app-specific context options, and on the Metro interface brings up a link to the All apps view, which lists every application on the system A-Z. Swiping in from the left, meanwhile, cycles through the currently running applications.

The basics are easy to grasp: a new user would instantly flick the Metro screen right and left, and when faced with the need to return to the main screen, a quick dab of the Windows key seems a logical resort. Rather like the Home button of Apple’s iPad, Windows 8 tablets will have a hardware Start button positioned in the display’s bezel, which makes it easy to get back to the Start screen.

The problem with Metro, and by definition many Metro apps, is that these critical controls aren’t easily discoverable. Want to reorder the apps on the Start screen? You need to drag them up or down before moving them around – we’d have thought a simple long press would be more intuitive. How about unpinning and uninstalling? Just drag the tile up or down a little bit to bring up the menu. You can bring up a list of currently running apps by quickly flicking a thumb in from the left edge and back again. Then there’s the gesture required to move apps into split-screen mode: drag from the top edge and swipe towards the left or right of the screen.

All the gestures feel intuitive once you get the hang of them, but with the absence of a comprehensive tutorial, not all the gestures are instantly obvious. It’s also rather too easy to activate gestures involuntarily – when the mere flick of a stray thumb or finger is capable of opening a menu or switching between applications, we occasionally found ourselves doing so by mistake. It’s a needless irritation.

Text input, copy and paste

The other critical plank of touch functionality, on a tablet at least, is text input and manipulation. This is an area where Android tablets have been weak in the past, with many cheaper devices suffering from laggy, unresponsive typing. We’re happy to say this is an area in which Windows 8 excels. On our test device – a Sandy Bridge Core i5-based Samsung 700T with an 11.6in 1,366 x 768 widescreen – the keyboard occupied almost half the screen, and we found the keys large and easy to hit accurately.

On this hardware it was highly responsive, too. When you hit a key, a letter appears on screen instantly, with no lag or delay. There are also alternative layouts available – a split layout for thumb typing and a full, five-row layout – but these are much more fiddly to use.

The other option is pen input, which takes advantage of Windows’ already excellent handwriting recognition. This works best with a digitiser stylus of the kind supplied with our Samsung tablet, but you can use your finger or a capacitive stylus as well. The great thing about this is that the entry field is extremely large, making it easy to write at speed.

Text selection, cutting and pasting, we’re happy to say, has also been implemented well. A simple, single or double tap on an area of text brings up a couple of small circular handles, which can then be dragged into position. Tapping the selected area of text then launches the Cut and Copy menu; a long press meanwhile pops up the Paste menu.

Touch on the desktop

Microsoft has made big changes here and, in some areas, it’s done itself proud. The Explorer’s new toolbar makes carrying out file operations appreciably easier; window contents are scrollable and zoomable with the usual flick and pinch gestures; and right clicks are achieved with the same long press that will be familiar from Windows 7 tablets and touch devices.

However, you’ll soon run up against a host of little niggles that will leave you yearning for a mouse and keyboard. In Metro, the touch keyboard behaves as expected, popping up whenever a text field is tapped. In desktop mode, you have to manually launch it, and when you’ve finished, you’ll have to hide it manually too.

There are other problems, but the most critical is out of Microsoft’s control: third-party apps. You might have imagined that simple operations such as scrolling and zooming would work automatically, but that simply isn’t the case. Although some apps such as Chrome and Firefox work to a point, and are sure to mature into a more touch-friendly form in due course, other applications don’t support touch properly now and, crucially, it may take some time before they do.

In short, using desktop applications on Windows 8 with a touchscreen involves far too much stopping, thinking and head-scratching to be even remotely practical right now, and we recommend you avoid it; at least until developers begin to update their applications with support for touch. Either that, or have a mouse and keyboard at the ready.

Performance and responsiveness

Responsiveness, as we’ve found while testing countless Android tablets, is absolutely critical to touchscreen devices. And on our Core i5 tablet responsiveness was spot on. Critical to this is Windows 8’s hardware acceleration, which extends from the Metro desktop to Internet Explorer 10.

In these areas, Windows 8 is responsive as it gets, with ultra slick panning, scrolling, dragging and zooming. It feels every bit as slick as we’d hope it to – for once, touch doesn’t feel tacked on, it feels like a real asset to the OS. We’ll have to wait and see if Windows RT is as good – it’ll be running on less powerful hardware remember – but for now the signs are good.

Verdict

It’s with Windows 8 that Microsoft has finally got to grips with touch: on tablets, multi-touch laptops – or indeed the forthcoming swathe of touchscreen laptops and hybrid devices – Windows 8 is ready to deliver a slick, refined touch experience. Yes, there’s a reasonably steep learning curve of new gestures and UI elements, and Microsoft does an abysmal job of introducing these to newcomers, but there’s an enormously powerful touch OS lying underneath. Features such as the seamless sharing of data between apps, live tiles and the superb handwriting recognition are either unique to Windows 8, or far ahead of what the tablet competition offers.

The Windows 8 desktop remains as unsuited to touch operation as its predecessor, but on tablets with a keyboard and touchpad – such as the deliciously promising Microsoft Surface – Windows 8 offers something none of its rivals can match: access to a proper file system and full-fat, powerful applications. We’ll have to reserve our judgement on Windows RT, the ARM-based version of Windows 8, until hardware arrives, but its lack of Windows desktop already dents its appeal.

But for touchscreen tablets, hybrids and multi-touch enabled laptops, Microsoft has delivered a compelling – and in many ways, much more powerful – alternative to iOS and Android. It’s not perfect, and much depends on the quality of forthcoming apps and hardware, but if the goal of Windows 8 is to rejuvenate its appeal across the whole spectrum of touch-enabled devices, then we believe it’s succeeded.

Details
Software subcategory	Operating system
Requirements
Processor requirement	1GHz or higher
Operating system support
Other operating system support	N/A