On Wednesday, February 29, Microsoft released the long-awaited public beta of its most ambitious OS yet – Windows 8. Windows 8, the successor to Windows 7, is a radical departure from the notion of traditional desktop computing. Microsoft already released the Windows 8 Developer Preview in September at its //build/ conference, but it was an unstable and buggy release and only functioned properly with touch. With the Consumer Preview, those doubts are gone. It is a stable release, and works amazingly well with touch, keyboard, or mouse. The Windows team hammered down a few phrases, the most important of which is “a no-compromise experience.” Windows 8 touts a completely new design for Windows, similar to the Windows Phone UI, called Metro. It might very well be the biggest user interface revolution since Windows 95. And Microsoft definitely showed that it was working hard on “reimagining Windows.” You can download it right now at the Windows 8 Consumer Preview website.
So let’s get started on the details.
