A Review of the Windows 8 Beta

Today, Microsoft released the free public beta of Windows 8. You can download this Consumer Preview right now. (It’s a very far cry from the crude early version released last September.)

It’s a huge radical rethinking of Windows — and one that’s beautiful, logical and simple. In essence, it brings the attractive, useful concept of Start-screen tiles, currently available on Windows Phone 7 phones, to laptops, desktop PC’s and tablets.

I’ve been using Windows 8 for about a week on a prototype Samsung tablet. And I have got to tell you, I’m excited.

For two reasons. First, because Windows 8 works fluidly and briskly on touch screens; it’s a natural fit. And second, it attains that success through a design that’s all Microsoft’s own. This business of the tiles is not at all what Apple designed for iOS, or that Google copied in Android.

Here’s how I described the design (called Metro) when I reviewed Windows Phone 7. All of it applies to Windows 8:

Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent. The design is intelligent, clean and uncluttered. Never in a million years would you guess that it came from the same company that cooked up the bloated spaghetti that is Windows and Office.

Most impressively, Windows Phone 7 is not a feeble-minded copycat. Microsoft came up with completely fresh metaphors that generally steer clear of the iPhone/Android design (grid-spaced icons scrolling across Home pages).

The home screen presents two columns of colorful tiles. Each represents something you’ve put there for easy access: an app, a speed-dial entry, a Web page, a music playlist or an e-mail folder.

More than ever, the text on them conveys instant information, saving you the effort of opening them up. A number on a tile tells you how many voice mail messages, e-mail messages or app updates are waiting. The music tile shows album art, the calendar tile identifies your next appointment. A tile for your sister might display her latest Twitter and Facebook updates.

In Windows 8, those tiles show you what’s coming in from Facebook and Twitter. They identify the song that’s currently playing. They show you the current weather. All without leaving this Start-screen dashboard.

The starter apps include Camera, Xbox, Mail, Calendar, People, Messaging and Photos. There are also Music and Video apps that link to Microsoft’s music and video stores. (Microsoft is also introducing a Windows App Store that’s modeled on Apple’s.) You can drag these tiles around and create new screens full of them, labeled the way you like. It’s like a Lego kit for your life’s control panel.

Here’s another natural, effortless idea: Swiping your finger onto the screen from any of the edges bring hidden controls into view. That’s especially important in Internet Explorer 10, the new version of the Web browser, which otherwise displays no “chrome” — toolbars, buttons and other space-eating elements — at all when you’re browsing. Smart, right? Because your phone or tablet screen is usually smallish.

Swipe from the right edge to open the Start menu (with Search, Share, Devices and Settings buttons). Swipe from the left to switch apps. Swipe in and back out again to open the app switcher. Swipe down to open the browser address bar.

If you have a mouse, you can click screen corners, or hit keystrokes, to perform these same functions.

These swipes take about one minute to learn. On a tablet, I can’t begin to tell you how much fun it is. It’s evident that Microsoft has sweated over every decision — where things are, how prominent they are, how easy they are to access. (If you have the time, watch the videos to see all of this in action.)

The only huge design failure is that Microsoft couldn’t just abandon “real” Windows completely — desktop, folders, taskbar and all those thousands of programs. So on a PC, hiding behind this new Start screen is what looks almost exactly like the old Windows 7, with all of its complexity.

In other words, Windows 8 seems to favor tablets and phones. On a nontouch computer like a laptop or desktop PC, the beauty and grace of Metro feels like a facade that’s covering up the old Windows. It’s two operating systems to learn instead of one.

If you have two monitors, you can keep the regular Windows desktop on one screen, and the Start tiles on another. Or you may eventually get to the point where you never need the old desktop. In the meantime, though, this dual world is a little jarring.

The biggest difference on this “old” Windows world may be that the Start menu, that decades-old symbol of the Windows universe, is gone. On Microsoft’s Windows 8 design blog, you’ll find some thoughtful explanations:

“As more and more launching takes place from the task bar, the Start menu looks like a lot of user interface for programs you don’t use very frequently. And the Start menu is not well-optimized for this purpose. It affords limited customization, provides virtually no useful information, and offers only a small space for search results.

“In light of these realizations, we stepped back and reimagined the role of Start in Windows 8. We knew that we already had a powerful launcher for desktop programs in the taskbar. The Start screen is not just a replacement for the Start menu—it is designed to be a great launcher and switcher of apps, a place that is alive with notifications, customizable, powerful, and efficient. It brings together a set of solutions that today are disparate and poorly integrated.”

That degree of soul-searching seems to have gone on at every level of Windows 8’s design, and it’s glorious to see Microsoft get the religion of simplicity and beauty.

There aren’t really very many new features in Windows 8 otherwise, but one of the best is Windows To Go. I wasn’t able to test it, but the idea is intriguing: You can carry Windows 8, along with your programs, settings and files, on a flash drive or external hard drive. You can then jack it into any recent PC and see your whole world there. For businesses, that’s a much more secure arrangement than worrying about employees leaving important files and passwords behind on unknowable computers. And a much cheaper arrangement than buying everybody a laptop.

Look, it’s obvious that PC’s aren’t the center of our universe anymore. Apple maintains that you still need two operating systems — related, but different — for touch devices and computers. Microsoft is asserting that, no, you can have one single operating system on every machine, always familiar.

The company has a point: already, the lines between computers, tablets and phones are blurring. They’re all picking up features from each other — laptops with flash memory instead of hard drives, tablets with mice and keyboards. With Windows 8, Microsoft plans to be ready for this Grand Unification Theory.

It’s impossible to know how successful that theory will turn out to be. Windows 8 is a home run on tablets, but of course it has lost years to the iPad. (The Zune music player software was also beautiful — it was, in fact, the forerunner to Windows 8 — but it never did manage to close the iPod’s four-year head start.)

And there are some footnotes, like the fact that, on computers, the old Windows is still hiding. There are bugs and inconsistencies in this public beta that Microsoft needs to address before Windows 8 becomes a final product later this year.

But one thing is knowable now: With Windows 8, Microsoft has sweated the details, embraced beauty and simplicity, and created something new and delightful. Get psyched.

Editors’ Note: David Pogue writes books about technology, including how-to guides. Among them is a coming guide to the new Windows 8 operating system. These projects are neither commissioned by nor written in cooperation with the product manufacturers.