Articles about Windows 8

The Computer Electronics Show gathers a significant number of companies and prospective buyers alike in Las Vegas for four days starting Tuesday. However, many companies didn't wait for opening day. Which among the early birds stand out from the others?

From the plethora of pre-show announcements most are oriented towards general consumer appliances. For instance, LG's presentation emphasized 39 new driers and 72 new fridges, among super expensive OLED TVs. For a passionate technology enthusiast like myself CES is not Heaven, it's utter Hell. Still, within the literally hundreds of announcements there are some exciting products unveiled in all the pre-show madness.

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BlueStacks has been very busy lately, inking a series of deals with major partners to bring its App Player software to a much wider audience. The App Player, if you’re not familiar, virtualizes the Android environment and lets users download and run green droid apps on desktop and laptop computers. The company last year formed partnerships with Asus, MSI, and AMD, and at the end of December rolled out a beta version of its software for Macs. Today’s CES announcement is, however, easily the firm’s biggest coup to date.

China’s Lenovo, which late last year usurped HP as the world’s largest PC manufacturer, will start bundling the BlueStacks App Player on all of its Idea-branded line of consumer PCs, including Ideapad laptops and IdeaCentre desktops. A total of around 40 million systems.

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Finding the app you want on Windows 8 -- by sight alone -- can at times feel like a really frustrating game of Where’s Wally. If your eyes are already flicking around the screen, it makes sense to use them as a control method, right? Well, that’s what Tobii thinks at least. The company is releasing a USB bar which attaches to the bottom of any monitor displaying Windows 8, and tracks your eye movements.

Due to be shown at CES, Tobii REX is described as the "world’s first Gaze interaction computer peripheral for the consumer market" and works in conjunction with touch, keyboard and mouse.

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Little more than two months after Windows 8's release, popular cloud storage service Dropbox finally offers an app through the Windows Store. However, unlike Box and SkyDrive, which both deliver a fairly competent feature set, the Dropbox app for Windows 8/RT is a half-baked affair, leaving much to be desired.

Even at first glance, the Dropbox app touts a modest feature set with no advanced functionality to speak of. It allows users to browse and preview uploaded files, edit, open and save items from "other Windows 8 apps", and share and find files using the Search Charm. Users cannot edit uploaded Dropbox files using the app, only open items, making it a glorified file browser with a few extra features. Furthermore Dropbox for Windows 8 appears to be rather unstable.

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There is friendly disagreement here at BetaNews. My friend and colleague, Mihaita Bamburic, uses Windows 8, but laments that he wants to return to the last era by downgrading to version 7. While I feel for him, and he certainly has that option, I would say the same thing I did to my family when I upgraded our household computers -- yes it is different, but I doubt Microsoft is going back now.

That is a harsh statement, although I certainly put it as gently as possible to my wife and kids. However, aside from my assertion that things will not revert, there are several other reasons I feel no loss in this move.

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Tenth in a series. Welcome to this year's first look at what's new and hot in Windows Store and the Windows 8 ecosystem. The week has been rather uneventful but that can easily be explained with the Holiday season, which is never the most productive time of the year when it comes to software. This week there are 23,788 apps in the U.S. Windows Store of which 4,439 are paid applications of which about half offer free trials, and 19,365 free apps. Some of the free apps may include advertisement or in-store purchases, but there is unfortunately no statistic available on that.

Here is a selection of 10 Windows 8 apps that released this week or were updated.

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Life as an early adopter is sprinkled with moments of joy and regret after first trying out a product up until another shiny toy takes its place. The burning desire to pursue something new often backfires in my endeavors, with personal expectations rarely fulfilled by cutting-edge software or hardware. My experience running Windows 8 is no different, as Microsoft's latest entry into consumer operating systems seldom ticks all the right boxes. But I plow through, even though what I really want is to go back to Windows 7. (Oh my, my colleague Alan Buckingham disagrees.)

I started using Windows 8 in mid-August and throughout all my time with it not once did I ever feel comfortable enough to say: "This is a keeper". Fact is what I love about Windows 8 I almost never use, and what I loathe I do have to deal with every single time -- it's a self-destructive relationship I simply do not want to be in anymore. On the other hand, at the opposite end lies Windows 7, which fits me like a tailored suit -- no extra "in your face" functionality that I rarely take advantage of. Simply put -- less is more.

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What's the first thing that springs to mind when you think of Windows 8? "Confusing", "difficult to use", "efficient", "tiles" or "US Department of Defense" might be among the possible answers. Whoa, what? Yes, the Department of Defense (DOD) has announced that, as part of a $617 million licensing deal, it will begin using the newest versions of Microsoft products, including the controversial operating system. Now think of all the possible jokes...

The announcement does not disclose the entire number of products that will be used, and only mentions Office 2013 (which the DOD says offers "enhanced security and content management tools"), SharePoint 2013, and Windows 8. The Department of Defense says that the beneficiaries of the deal will be the US Air Force, Army and DISA (Defence Information Systems Agency), and that the purchased package is already customized to meet its specific needs, with an ongoing focus towards mobile computing.

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Yesterday, Net Applications released usage share data for December, although the number is widely reported today as being market share. It's not. Already, several blogs pulled out Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 stats, and their writers and story commenters draw conclusions about the operating system's early adoption. They're wrong to do so, and you'd be wise not to believe them.

NetApps culls its data from browser usage, which often isn't synonymous with operating systems. High usage of one browser can skew the data, which it does for mobile operating systems. For example, the data shows that in December, iOS mobile OS share (on phones and tablets) was 60.56 percent compared to Android's 22.1 percent. But, whoa, the numbers are similar for the Apple and Android browsers -- 60.13 percent and 24.6 percent, respectively. A quick read of NetApps mobile OS share suggests iOS is more than twice Android. That's not the case based on data from Apple, Google and analyst firms like comscore, Gartner, IDC and IHS iSuppli.

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Some years I make resolutions, others I don’t. The ones I make are usually the same -- lose weight and get fitter (something I finally achieved this year thanks to the Zombies, Run app), get that novel finished and land a book deal (another tick in the 2012 "done" box), and cut back on the amount of caffeine I consume (well, you can’t win them all).

For 2013 I thought I’d make a short list of tech-related resolutions, things I genuinely plan to do or achieve, and share them with you. So, in no particular order, here they are:

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For those used to cutting the rope or drawing "something", Microsoft Surface Pro is not going to be the tablet for you. Microsoft’s latest attempt to conquer the business end of the tablet market has left many puzzled as to why the software giant has priced a basically untested product right at the $900 mark, when the latest generation iPad starts at $499. They assume, perhaps understandably, that Surface Pro competes with Apple's pride and joy, yet they are wrong. Surface Pro is actually a miniaturized laptop trapped inside a tablet's shell.

For professionals and power users it doesn’t take long to realize that Surface Pro is as far away as possible from a basic consumer-oriented tablet. The dead giveaway is the processor and graphics card combination -- a third generation Core i5 CPU paired with an HD Graphics 4000 GPU, both made by Intel. Together they really shout from the top of their silicons: "We really come from PC technology!" The naysayers should therefore understand where Microsoft is actually going with Surface Pro -- towards professionals and power users, not the Cut The Rope or Draw Something crowd (although it can be used for that too).

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Ninth in a series. The world did not end last week, so here we are with this weeks installment of our weekly look at the greatest Windows 8 apps that got released or updated this week.

The store recently crossed the 35,000 apps mark worldwide according to MetroStore Scanner, and while you won't find that many apps in your local store -- the US app store has 22,876 currently -- it is remarkable after two months of release; 18,618 of those apps in the US store are free to download and use, while 4,249 are paid apps. That is a ratio of more than four to one, and while some free apps may include advertisement or in-game purchase options, it's still a healthy ratio for the store.

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If there's one word that best describes my personal tech use for 2012, change is definitely it. For the most part of the year I "cheated" one platform with another, with no particular personal favorite to get me through (almost) 365 days. Each piece of software and hardware is used for a particular scenario, something that I find rather soothing for my personal early adopter endeavors as well as my sanity. I just can't stand tinkering with the same bit of tech for longer periods of time, although there still is a dear old friend in my life...

My colleagues Alan Buckingham and Wayne Williams already wrote about their personal tech choices in 2012, and now it's my turn. Without further ado here is what I used most throughout the year, starting with my trusty dear old friend.

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To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, "Technology moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it". Smartphones and tablets are being updated, iterated and replaced so quickly these days. Take the iPad. Apple rolled out a new version in March, and then replaced it with a faster model in November. You’re never at the cutting edge for long, so you need to enjoy that moment while you can (not that it really matters if your tech devices are a generation or two behind, of course -- so long as they work and do what you need them to).

My colleague Alan Buckingham wrote the first of the BetaNews team’s personal tech retrospectives yesterday. Now it’s my turn.

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Eighth in a series. Since the world is going down today anyway there is not really much need for today's article and while I thought for a moment about taking the day off, I'd like the idea of leaving the world with work done. So, here it is, the eighth part of the best Windows 8 apps of the week series on Doomsday.

Pssst: If the world doesn't end, and you have Windows 8, now you have something to look forward to.

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