Microsoft’s new version of Windows is fantastic, jarring, and risky at the same time. Fantastic because it marks the clearest sign yet that Microsoft is embracing the future, shifting from the device that defined the company—the personal computer—to the new era of mobile machines. Windows 8, which is being released on Wednesday as an unfinished “consumer preview” (download yours here!), is an excellent touchscreen operating system. A few days ago Microsoft loaned me a prototype Samsung tablet running the new OS, and I’ve found the interface to be just as good as—and in some ways even better than—the iPad’s OS. If hardware companies begin making decent tablets to run Windows 8, the new operating system could make for the first worthy rival to Apple’s unstoppable machine. 
 
 What’s jarring, though, is Windows 8’s split personality. While it is optimized for touchscreens, the new OS is also meant to run on the billions of laptops and desktops that have long been Microsoft’s bread and butter. The company has tried to make the system work in both places by giving Windows two completely different interfaces that you can use side by side. First, there’s the Windows you grew up with, called the Desktop in Windows 8. In the Desktop, Windows lives up to its name—all your programs run in windows that you can position anywhere on your screen. When you run any program designed for today’s Windows in the new OS, it will show up in the Desktop interface. 
 
 But the Desktop isn’t how Windows 8 greets you. When you turn a Windows 8 PC on for the first time, you’ll see a Start page that’s composed of a series of brightly colored program tiles. These tiles are the gateway to Windows’ new interface, known as Metro, which was inspired by Microsoft’s wonderful Windows Phone. I found the Metro interface easy to get the hang of, and for the most part I enjoyed using it. But make no mistake: Metro is the most radical transformation in Windows’ history, an interface so novel that I’ll likely need a few weeks to feel comfortable with it. I bet this will be true for many people, especially those of us who’ll be using it on a big-screen PC rather than a tablet (meaning almost everyone). Hence the risk: Metro may represent a much-needed upgrade to an aging OS, but will Windows’ adherents consider it too much change, too fast? 
 
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 The new interface offers several advantages over the traditional Windows model that will prove especially useful for touchscreen devices. As with Apple’s tablet, you won’t be able to download Metro programs from just anywhere on the Web—a change that’s certain to flummox longtime Windows users. The new interface can only run specially designed apps, which are only available through Microsoft’s built-in Windows Store. By limiting apps to those you download from a centralized store, and by strictly governing the level of access that those apps get to your computer’s resources, programs will be easier to install and malware will become less pervasive. (You can still download traditional Windows programs, though they’ll run in the Desktop view.) 
 
 Metro also disposes with windows. Yes, really. By default, all Metro programs take up the full screen. And the maximum number of Metro programs you can display on your screen at the same time is two—and even then, one window occupies almost the full screen, with the second program squeezed to a narrow band on the side. In the shot below, for instance, I’ve got a PDF displayed on the right side while the Finance app is scrunched on the left. 
 
 It’s not quite right to say that Windows 8 kills windows, because as Microsoft takes pains to point out, most Windows 8 machines will still be able to run every Windows program ever written. (The exception will be a new breed of Windows tablets that use mobile-friendly ARM processors—those will be able to run all Metro apps, but very few traditional programs.) Still, it’s clear that Microsoft believes Metro is the future of Windows. You get the sense that the company is keeping the Desktop interface around in the same way that it included a command prompt in Windows 95—as a way to keep the old guard placated until they adjusted to the new way of doing things. 
 
 Is getting rid of windows so bad for Windows? It depends. On a touchscreen, the Metro interface is just about perfect. Although I sometimes noticed a few hiccups in performance—sometimes my swipe gestures didn’t work and sometimes scrolling and switching between apps was jerky—I chalked those up to the imperfect hardware and the fact that the OS is still in beta mode. Still, I noticed several design advances over Apple’s mobile OS. Windows 8 allows you to switch between applications with a single swipe from the edge of the screen. Apple recently added a four-finger swipe to let you switch between apps on the iPad, but I find that two-step move more cumbersome than the Windows 8 app-switching gesture.* 
 
 I also like how Windows 8 displays one skinny app and one wide app on the screen at the same time. That’s another improvement on the iPad, in which every app occupies the full screen. On Windows 8, I can keep an eye on my inbox in the small pane while I browse the Web in the large one, an extremely handy touch. Finally, I’m a big fan of “live tiles,” a feature that Windows 8 borrowed from Windows phone. The Start screen’s tiles constantly surface new information without you opening them up: The email tile shows you new messages, for example, while the calendar tile displays your upcoming appointments. It’s an advance I wish Apple would copy. 
 
 When you run Windows 8 on a desktop computer, though, the Metro interface is tougher to bear. For a few hours on Tuesday, I plugged the Samsung tablet into my 24-inch display, attached a keyboard and mouse, and tried to write this column using Metro apps. Microsoft hasn’t put out a Metro version of Word, so instead I opened up Microsoft’s online Word app in the Metro version of Internet Explorer. It loaded perfectly, but I nevertheless had a problem: The 24-inch screen was just too large for a single word-processing task. When I write, I like to have my notes and Web browser open on the screen as well. Metro, though, wouldn’t allow me to look at all of that stuff at the same time, and I had to keep switching back and forth. I felt like I was wasting a lot of my display. ||||| The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is only just becoming available to the public, but we’ve had the opportunity to use it for a few days on a Samsung slate nearly identical to the one we sampled at the BUILD conference for developers last year. While the device we’re using is nearly the same, the operating system itself has undergone a lot of refinement since our initial report last September. 
 
 
 
 We can’t wait to install the Consumer Preview on a wide variety of current PCs and tell you all about how well it does or does not work, as well as provide tips and tricks for those of you installing it for yourselves. We know you don’t want to wait, so we offer our initial impressions of the release based on several days with a Microsoft-provided, Samsung-built slate running the same release the public will download. There’s only one major difference: the Store is not yet functional, so these impressions are based only on the apps built into the Windows 8 Consumer Preview itself. 
 
 
 
 Jason Cross says: 
 
 This is definitely not the flaky, feature-light version of Windows 8 released for developers last year. It’s dramatically smoother and more responsive. Apps snap open, and flipping between them is immediate. The People and Photos hubs are there, showcasing Windows 8’s integration with multiple services like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Flickr. Using these new apps and hubs with a touchscreen is a joy. They could all use a little polish and a few more features, though. It needs to be easier to save photos locally from Facebook or Flickr in the Photos hub, for instance. Everything is big, bright, smooth, and beautiful. I confined myself to a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for awhile, and the experience is definitely diminished. 
 
 That’s not to say the keyboard and mouse experience is bad, mind you. I’m actually quite delighted at how well the whole Metro-style interface works with them. Microsoft has made some very welcome tweaks to accommodate the hundreds of millions of users with no touchscreen. It’s just so...new. I spent a good hour just discovering how to do things I’ve known how to do in Windows for over a decade. It’s usually a good feeling, because when I figure out how Windows 8 does something differently (like display all installed programs), I’m usually impressed by its speed and elegance. Let me say that again: I’m impressed by the speed and elegance of a Microsoft interface. Really! 
 
 [Related: Windows 8 Consumer Preview: A Visual Tour] 
 
 
 
 Unfortunately, I think it’s going to get rough welcome. People often don’t like change at first. Just look at the way every little tweak to the Facebook interface is received. It takes a little time, and a little trial and error, to discover where everything is, how it works, and how to get around. Then it takes a little more poking around to get really fast at it. We all know how the Internet works: there are people who will use something for two minutes (or not at all) and spend the rest of the day complaining about it on forums, comments, message boards, and social networks. 
 
 I can sympathize. It’s unsettling to see such basic tenets of the Windows user experience shifted so dramatically. Windows 8 wants me to do a lot of things through the Metro interface that I used to do on a desktop interface, and there was some natural resistance to that at first. I only had to look for something in the wrong place once to become frustrated, and it took a little time to unlearn all I had learned since Windows 95. 
 
 
 
 The good news is: there’s a payoff for sticking with it. It doesn’t take long, and before you know it you’re using new shortcuts and flying around the OS like an old pro. I can’t wait for the Store to launch, because much to my surprise, I find myself really valuing the Metro-style applications and they way they operate, even when using a keyboard and mouse. I want Metro apps for Spotify and Evernote, a great Twitter client and a native Facebook app. I want a Metro-style front end for Steam. I have some concerns about how well everything scales to a large monitor, but more and more, as I spent time with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, I just wanted the OS to be done and on the market already. So I suppose that’s “mission accomplished” for the folks in Redmond. 
 
 
 
 Nate Ralph says: 
 
 Touch has always been an interesting novelty, but I kept the slate running the Consumer Preview docked, relying on the keyboard and mouse to get around. And every so often, I found myself trying to nudge the cursor along with the spacebar, wondering where my trackpad had gone. Eventually I’d give up and use a finger to tap on the particular app I’d been trying to get to, all the while oblivious to the mouse idling beside my hands. 
 
 That’s the right sort of disorienting. Tablets imply limitations: consider Android and iOS, operating systems explicitly designed to meld well with your hands. Grids of fixed, finger-friendly icons are all but mandatory, to ensure the user experience is a fluid one. 
 
 Windows 8 abandons any such notions; the device melts away, and you’re left with a canvas that responds to your interactions. Gestures make sense, whatever your input preference: I slid effortlessly between dragging my finger across the screen, clicking around with the mouse, and tapping at the keyboard, depending on whatever made sense at the moment. This versatility is going to be key for users trying to make sense of the bold new interface. 
 
 And then I remembered the stylus. Windows has offered phenomenal, native handwriting recognition since the halcyon days of XP – but good luck finding an application or device to take advantage of it. Hopefully, the push for Windows 8 tablets is going to alleviate that issue. But this is yet another facet of that uncompromising design that's driving everything about the Windows 8 experience: I typed on a keyboard when the slate was at my desk, but took the stylus to meetings and wrote notes by hand. 
 
 Bizarre, that in light of all of the new features I reach for something as archaic as a stylus. But I’ve waited years for this – an operating system that works with me. The device is largely irrelevant – I happen to like taking notes with a pen, but use a combination of the touchscreen and a keyboard. Windows 8 leaves every option on the table, and that's fantastic. 
 
 I’m still a little concerned about how this will translate onto larger screens – especially once the apps start to pile on. But things are shaping up nicely-- consider me smitten. 
 
 It looks like Windows 8 is certainly going to take some getting used to. But underneath that daunting new interface are a wealth of smart decisions that go a long way towards dragging the behemoth that is Windows into the future. Perhaps most promising is the stuff we haven't looked at yet: the apps, and the way multiple Windows 8 PCs and tablets sync together. What we see here has us excited, but it doesn't have the level of polish that makes us think it's just about ready to go. Judging by the quality here, it looks likely to release this fall, though Microsoft has made no official announcement. 
 
 If you want to see for yourself, download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and let us know what you think of it in the comments. 
 
 Have you downloaded Windows 8 Consumer Preview? Or do you have no interest in changing to a new version of Windows? Either way, we'd like to hear your opinion. Please take PCWorld's Windows 8 Survey. It'll take five minutes or less. 
 
 Follow Jason Cross and Nate Ralph on Twitter. 
 
 For more blogs, stories, photos, and video about Microsoft Windows 8, check out PCWorld's complete Windows 8 coverage. ||||| I'm writing this article on a Windows 8 tablet. Thankfully, I've got a wireless keyboard and mouse as well as a dock to help the Samsung developer tablet act more like a regular PC. Microsoft made the Windows 8 Consumer Preview available this morning to everyone who wants to check it out. It was also kind enough to give Mashable a sneak peek. 
 
 What exactly is a consumer preview? I can tell you this: It definitely means it's not ready for general release. It's been a challenge trying to separate issues that are due to the inherent bugginess of a pre-release, changes that I'm just not used to, and things that are real problems. But here goes. 
 
 First, a little background: Windows 8 is a complete re-imagining of Windows. And it's also the same. Its schizophrenic nature is due to its two modes: the familiar (yet subtly different) desktop that we're all used to, and the Metro interface. Metro, borrowed from the Windows Phone platform, takes a hard right turn from traditional Windows: Instead of files and folders, there are touchable tiles that fire up your apps, and those apps take up the whole screen. 
 
 That's really just scratching the surface of Metro, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. For this look at Windows 8, I'm going to focus mainly on the bigger-picture features and what's new since the initial developer release from last fall. Microsoft says that where the developer build was about emphasizing touch, with the consumer preview (Build 8250 for those scoring at home) it focused on showing how the mouse and keyboard is just as friendly to Metro. 
 
 My first impression: Almost, but not quite. 
 
 Metro With a Mouse & Keyboard 
 
 Microsoft has a vision, a dream even. It wants to have the same operating system running across all its devices. It's a laudable goal, with many advantages for both Microsoft and its customers. The thing is people use different gadgets differently — you don't do all the same things on a tablet that you do on a PC, and when you do, the experience is different. 
 
 Microsoft knows this, so Windows 8 is highly adaptable. It responds differently to touch than it does to a mouse. For example, to bring up your Settings menu with your finger, just slide in from the edge; if you have a mouse, you aim for the corner. 
 
 Making the corners the key points when operating Windows 8 with a mouse is a good choice — they're pretty unmissable and you don't need to be precise. However, some of the subtleties in the interface appear to be poorly thought out. 
 
 For starters, the icons don't follow standard web "mouseover" rules. Take one example: When you point toward the lower left corner, Windows 8 (either Metro or desktop) calls up the Start screen. Or rather, it calls up an icon for the Start screen, but if you hover your mouse over it, it disappears. This goes against what websites have trained people to do for a decade: call up menus by holding your mouse over icons, then navigating through the menu by staying on top of it. 
 
 It sounds like a minor point, but it's actually not, and the same problem bubbles up time and again from Windows 8: unintuitiveness. Metro is a beautiful and powerful interface, but it's hard to get used to, sometimes needlessly so. Another example: the Start screen allows you to scroll left and right simply by pushing your mouse icon right up against the edges of the screen. Yet several apps (like Photos) incomprehensibly don't do this, instead forcing you to use a scrollbar (or the mouse scroll wheel). Again, it sounds minor, but it's everything. 
 
 Also, Metro is all about scrolling left and right. Apps like Finance look beautiful, with amazing layouts and great landscape pictures. So why have the top and bottom edges do nothing at all when you mouse against them? We're all used to calling up docks or menus when pressing against the edge, and Metro even lets you do this via touch. It would have been helpful to keep some of that functionality when using the mouse. 
 
 Working with a keyboard was better, with intuitive navigation via arrow keys. There are some nice keyboard shortcuts (like screengrab) that you can't replicate via touch, so it definitely opens up the experience. There was occasionally a little lag with the wireless keyboard Microsoft supplied us with, but it was something I could live with. 
 
 (lots more after the gallery) 
 
 Windows 8 Consumer Preview: The Good and the Bad 
 
 Sharing 
 
 Sharing — from any app — is built directly in to Windows 8. It's like having that suite of sharing icons (like the ones you see on every news website, including Mashable) at the ready at all times. "Share" is ever-present in your options menu, no matter what app you're in. Sharing in Windows 8 is an incredibly powerful feature, making Apple's Twitter integration in OS X Mountain Lion look like a pathetic baby step. 
 
 At least that's the theory. Sharing is app-based, and so far there are no apps that work with it. When you hit Share in an app, all that's on the list is a lonely Mail icon. In fairness, this is the consumer preview, and the Windows Store — where all those Metro sharing apps will be available — hasn't even launched yet. 
 
 It's important to note that sharing in Windows 8 is based on what are called contracts. Contracts are little pieces of software that an app uses to tell Windows that something in the app is shareable. Then Windows knows to call up the apps that have the ability to share when the time comes. Contracts makes it super easy for a developer to create an app that can share stuff. 
 
 So why, then, is the ability absent from so many apps? I understand the Finance app not being able to share, but People? I might want to email a contact to someone — you're going to make me copy-and-paste, Windows? And you can forget about sharing anything from the classic desktop. 
 
 Quibbles aside, sharing in Windows 8 could be its best feature, but we'll have to wait for the apps to come that integrate the feature. Contracts support a lot more than sharing — they also determine whether the content in an app is searchable and enable apps to interact with other apps. A contract could, for example, allow Facebook to take stories from a news reader. There's lots of potential here, but it's up to developers to unleash it. 
 
 Cruising in Metro 
 
 Metro is a very pretty interface. The tiles beg to be clicked and touched, and many of the apps are extremely pleasing to look at and interact with. Finance, as I mentioned, makes great use of the horizontal scroll. The Xbox Live app looks amazing, too, which is expected since the Xbox 360 is already moving toward Metro. Bing Maps is flat-out hot. 
 
 Some apps need work, however. People, which appears to be a social hub that integrates your feeds from places like Facebook and Twitter is about as far from Flipboard as you can imagine. It's not even MotoBLUR. 
 
 The Photos app did a good job importing my pics from Facebook and Microsoft's own cloud service, SkyDrive, but Flickr failed to load, despite many attempts (likely a bug). Mail is a bit clunky: although it easily lets you sync multiple accounts, I shouldn't need to click twice to go back to the accounts page. 
 
 The Metro Start screen is very customizable... again, in theory. In practice, rearranging tiles in any precise way is virtually impossible. Once you move one, it moves others in unpredictable ways, making the whole exercise more like solving a Rubik's Cube than decorating your desktop. You can make tiles out of websites, but you can't change the size of those tiles like you can with apps. 
 
 Opening Windows? 
 
 You might think from my many yellow and red flags that I'm rooting against Windows 8. (Disclosure: I've used a Mac as my primary computer for more than a decade.) I'm not. I'm pulling for Microsoft with its bid to reinvent its core software for the mobile era. I think Windows is ripe for a revamp, the market needs more innovation, and Metro has already proven to be an excellent phone interface. 
 
 Still, after using Metro as mouse-and-keyboard inteface, I'm more wary. As beautiful as Metro is, I think some of the decisions Microsoft has made in how it works on a traditional (that is, a non-touchscreen) PC are questionable. There's still plenty of time for Microsoft to tweak it before the general release this fall, though I'm starting to wonder if the approach of one OS for all devices — desktop, laptop, tablet, touch screen and non — is fundamentally flawed. 
 
 It makes sense that, If you're going to use the same device as a tablet and a traditional PC, it would react differently to your different tools. But in practice, it flies in the face of intuition. Your gadget "muscle memory" gets confused if your mouse pointer solicits a different menu from what your finger gets via the same movement. 
 
 In the end, Microsoft isn't just asking you to get used to a different interface for Windows. It's asking you to get used to multiple interfaces within the same OS. I'm not sure how many people have the patience for that. Still, Windows 8 can only get more stable and easier to use while it slowly advances toward a general release, and Metro is gorgeous enough to keep me looking forward to Windows 8's final act.
– Microsoft unleashed Windows 8 on the world today, in the form of a "Consumer Preview" (read: Open Beta), and it's definitely not business as usual. The OS is designed to work on both tablets and PCs, and that means that, while it still has a familiar Windows "Desktop" mode tucked inside, its default is a bold new "Metro" system that (gasp) does away with "windows" entirely. Apps, which must be purchased from the Windows Store, all run essentially full screen. Here's what people are saying: Farhad Manjoo of Slate calls it "fantastic, jarring, and risky at the same time." Microsoft clearly thinks Metro is the future—"You get the sense that the company is keeping the Desktop interface around the same way it included the command prompt in Windows 95"—but he found it awkward on his desktop. "I felt like I was wasting a lot of my display." "It's by far the most integrated and most capable operating system Microsoft has ever put out," gushes Seth Rosenblatt of CNET. "There's a speed and responsiveness to Windows 8 that no other version of Windows has ever had." His assessment: "It would be beyond shocking if Windows 8 landed like Vista did." But Peter Pachal for Mashable "the same problem bubbles up time and again in Windows 8: unintuitiveness. Metro is a beautiful and powerful interface, but it's hard to get used to," and lots of little things don't work the way you'd expect. "I think it's going to get rough welcome," predicts Jason Cross of PC World. "People often don't like change at first." But he likes it. "I'm impressed by its speed and elegance. Let me say that again: I'm impressed by the speed and elegance of a Micrsoft interface. Really!"