Windows 8 review

START SCREEN APPS

The Start Screen is designed to hold its own apps, with built-in email (Mail), contacts (People) and calendar (Calendar) programs as standard, as well as Photos for browsing pictures. The apps are designed to be used primarily with a touchscreen interface and are brilliantly simple to use. Their large, clear interfaces are slick and easy to understand. Most impressively, animations are slick and smooth – this doesn’t fell like using Windows, but more like an Apple tablet. The apps are also easy to navigate with a mouse and keyboard, showing Microsoft hasn’t forgotten about its largest install base.

Start screen apps are large, bold and very easy to use

Where things are really different to normal Windows is that Start Screen apps work and function more like they’re on a tablet. For example, there’s no file menu and you swipe in from the side or bottom on a touchscreen device or right-click or hover the mouse in the top-right corner on a desktop computer to access options. You also don’t have to worry about closing applications down, as they pause automatically in the background and terminate when not in use.

Start screen apps run full-screen, but you can place two side-by-side

So far, so easy to get used to, but there’s a problem in that the apps are also designed to be run full-screen, so you can’t resize them to fit your monitor. The only consolation is that you can put two Start Screen apps into side-by-side mode, where one smaller app takes up one-third of the screen’s resolution and one takes up the rest. It’s a useful way of fitting more on the screen and you can put a Start Screen app side-by-side with the standard Desktop if you want to.

Mail is really easy to use, but lacks the advanced features of a ‘proper’ email client

What’s more surprising is that the apps generally don’t have as many features as real Desktop applications. Take Mail, for example, which won’t let you create rules to filter your email. Ultimately, this is likely to mean that you’ll end up using a combination of Start Screen and Desktop applications, depending on whether you want the full functionality or just a quick peek at some data.

WINDOWS STORE

It should come as no surprise that the only way to add new Start Screen apps is through the Windows Store. There’s a whole bunch of free software available at the moment, but as paid-for software will only come online with the full release of Windows 8 on 26th October 2012, it’s hard to comment on how good the selection of apps in the store will be. However, given the number of Windows PCs out there and the number of Windows 8 PCs that will ship just with people buying new laptops, we expect developers will get behind the store.

The Windows Store is your place for new Start screen apps, but there’s not that much available at the moment

At the time of writing, the store is a little bare and it doesn’t yet replicate everything that was available as a Windows Gadget: we really miss the XE Currency convertor, for example.