Posted on 03/04/2012 4:19:33 AM PST by SmokingJoe
Windows 8 is now available for anyone to download, and it already shows a ton of potential. In fact, Microsoft’s bold new OS, which reminds us a lot of Windows Phone, outshines the iPad in some key areas. Granted, there were things we didn’t like in our Windows 8 Consumer Preview — and the iPad 3 or iPad HD is just around the corner — but there’s no question that Apple will soon have a real fight on its hands. Here are the top 10 ways Windows 8 is better than the iPad right now. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBCUniversal.)
1. Windows 8 is more personal than iOS While iOS represents photos with a flower icon, Windows 8 lets you choose any photo you want to populate the live tile that lives on the Start screen. And that's just one of many ways you can customize the screen you'll see most. You can move items around, name groups of apps around and name them using the Semantic zoom feature, and pin everything from your favorite people and websites to the Start screen.
2. Faster multitasking on Windows 8 No double- tapping a button to see your stuff here. Windows 8 lets you thumb through the applications you recently opened fast and fluidly just by swiping from the left edge of the screen. If you want to see all of your open apps at once, swipe from the left edge and then pull your finger back towards the edge to reveal a thumbnail view
3. People App: Beyond the Address Book One of our favorite features in Windows 8 is the People app. Why? Because it automatically links duplicate contacts so that there’s only one person for a given name.......
(Excerpt) Read more at gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com ...
I don’t want my laptop limited by the capacity of a phone battery. And make no mistake, the speed and storage on a phone are limited by the battery that powers it.
I want the most powerful phone that battery technology will allow but when I get home, I want the horse power that only a plug in the wall can support. And I don’t want an OS that is hamstrung but the limits of mobile technology.
I don’t think they want to out iPad the iPad, I think they want to change the meme just like Apple did when they released the iPhone.
Apple is promoting the phone to replace the PC by basically putting the OS in a really big phone.
I think MS is trying to expand the traditional PC by putting it in really small containers.
Neither are doing this for our benefit. They are both trying to expand their market share. Personally, I want the most powerful phone I can get that is not hampered by trying to be a PC and I want a PC that is not hampered by trying to be a tablet or phone.
“Those blogs aren’t published by Apple.”
No they are not, and Microsoft doesn’t write articles for *shudder* MSNBC, but they are written by people that openly admit that they prefer Apple products and use nothing else.
And yes many do claim to be objective.
I want the smart phone I can use while sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car, the one I can quickly look up a fact on while sitting in a friend's house, the one I can check prices on while standing in a store aisle, etc.
In other words, I want the one that is easiest for a real human to use in a less than ideal environment, not necessarily the one that is most "powerful".
Some people will consider this a phone with "training wheels". Let them have their very powerful phones. I'll settle for my iPhone, training wheels and all.
It’s interesting that you would respond in that way. Apple burst onto the scene with arguably the most powerful phone on the market and kept doing so for several generations.
It was version 7. Never could get used to it. I found it very clunky compared to iOS or Android.
Thanks for the article, I just threw it on my 5 year old P4 laptop, only system I have around that I can wipe out and play with, don’t want to do my main machines.
On even that old clunker, it is fairly responsive, but I can see how it is really designed for a touch based system, while you can do everything with a mouse/keyboard some things would be much smoother with a touch screen.
It took me only a few mins to figure out where all the settings were, the side bars that showed running apps, and ‘app’ specific settings, etc. It doesn’t recognize the built in video card so can’t do the native widescreen resolution of the laptop screen, which seems odd given how well hardware has been detected from Vista on.
So first impressions, I like it, though not sure I would want it on a daily work desktop, but certainly on a touch based tablet.
In 10 years the “limitations” of phones are likely to be a great deal less significant than they are now. Compare today’s phones to those of 10 years ago, or 3 years ago, FTM.
SS technology is expanding rapidly. Its use, in theory anyway, can be much less volume and energy intensive than a spinning disk.
I also suspect batteries will become more efficient, or the fuel cells they’ve been talking about forever will become practical.
Difference is, Windows 8 will sell in huge quantities, ending up selling even more units than Windows 7, which has already sold a staggering 550 million in such a short time, even if those Windows 8 sales are split between traditional desktops and tablets.
Its not so much about “out iPading” the iPad, its about "out tableting" the iPad. Funny enough, long before the iPad, there were plenty of tablets including Windows XP tablets from as long ago as 2000.
Very well apparently.
There are plenty of reviews of the Samsung Windows 8 tablet(handed out by Microsoft at Build 2011 back in 2011), running a pre-beta windows 8 version. For the post part, the reviews were pretty good.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/13/windows-8-for-tablets-hands-on-preview/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umy1L2dl1Jk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw5y5E7UeAk
Didn't Microsoft sell their stake in MSNBC to GE several years ago, and didn't GE then turn round and sell MSNBC/NBC/Universal to Comcast was it just last year? And before that, didn't Microsoft also sell their stake in Comcast?
In any case, if you want a more “objective”(if that's the word) look at Windows 8 versus iPad, here is an article on CNN(which Microsoft has never had a stake in before), essentially bringing up points along the same lines as as the MSNBC article. The article was originally written in Wired magazine, an news outlet that is, if anything, notorious for its anti-Microsoft bias going back years, and on that record, should be hostile to Windows 8:
Five ways Windows 8 is better than iOS and Android
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/tech/mobile/windows-better-ios-android/index.html
Windows 8 comes in two versions(on the Intel, not the ARM version), the desktop and the tablet versions. The desktop version will have the traditional Windows 7 style desktop UI.
Yeah?
What about this from CNN then?:
Five ways Windows 8 is better than iOS and Android
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/tech/mobile/windows-better-ios-android/index.html
Here ya go:
Opinion: Windows 8 vs. OS X Mountain Lion — why Apple Suddenly Sucks
http://www.digitaltrends.com/apple/opinion-windows-8-vs-os-x-mountain-lion-why-apple-suddenly-sucks/
Battery tech has been stagnant for years. Flash is getting cheaper and more dense but what we need is more RAM and it sucks juice and thus at this point is limited by battery tech. CPUs are getting more efficient but ultimately, they are limited by battery tech also.
As far as fuel cells, Toshiba (IIRC) was spending a lot of money on methanol fuel cells a number of years back but is not longer aggressively persuing the technology now.
Things could always change tomorrow but right now they are just tweaking anodes and cathodes to get a few percent more out of batteries, what we need is orders of magnitude improvement. But if they can make a battery powerful enough to run a PC replacement, that battery technology will be powerful enough to power a real electric car alternative and buffer the grid, more power to them.
Moore’s Law has been chugging along for several decades now. The energy needed for a given computational power has gone down proportionately, as computers today don’t use much if any more power than 20 years ago, despite being many orders of magnitude more powerful.
I’m skeptical of claims that we are rapidly approaching the limits of what can be done to reduce size, cost and energy consumption of electronics. All such claims have failed for decades now.
Doesn’t mean THIS week’s claim might not be right, but I wouldn’t bet any large sums on it.
And they all had one thing in common: they sucked. They tried to be full notebook replacements without the power or capacity to do the job.
Like those early tablets, Microsoft's chronic problem has been that they try to be all things to all potential users, and as a result, don't do much very well, especially compares to alternatives that focus on areas of specialty (which of course, in turn suffer from problems of being "niche" systems).
The biggest potential pitfall to Windows 8 is that this mentality might simply get worse as they expand their core OS to encompass not just PCs, but also tablets and smartphones. That's liable to make things worse, not better.
Of course, it is possible that Microsoft has learned from their past mistakes. I, personally, just wouldn't bet on it.
Bingo. iOS need only run on a half dozen near identical well known platforms. Windows has to run on a gazillion hack jobs; that alone warrants near double the power and capacity for equal performance.
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