I just took a look at the Windows 8 developer preview on Daniel’s PC. It looks like a touch-screen system running a tablet oriented version of Microsoft’s “Metro” interface, which you might have seen on Windows Phone 7. At first glance, it looks really nice and the tiles on the home screen look very striking.
Just as I was looking forward to seeing what else I could find, Daniel tapped the start menu, revealing that the UI is running on top of the existing Windows user interface. This made me think of Windows Media Centre; a glossy front end that runs on top of the Windows UI.
There’s definitely something not quite right about having two different UIs running on the same machine. Don’t get me wrong, I think both UIs look great, espeically Metro but I can’t help thinking it feels a little graceless! I guess that from a business point of view, they’ve taken into account the exploding tablet market and “old school” users wishing to run traditional Windows apps. Makes sense I suppose!
Not wishing to be negative, but I don’t believe it’s possible to combine a tablet OS into a desktop PC OS in a single product.
I hope Microsoft prove me wrong.