Gadgetory

donnell Bell here for cnet.com and I'm talking to Seth Rosenblatt senior editor for seen it Seth you've been spending a lot of time with Windows 8 I have talked to me about Windows 8 what are we looking at here sure this is the new start screen it replaces your Start menu if you want to think of it as having blown up your Start menu that's a great way to think of it instead of having these little icons that you have to go into you instead have these live tiles as you can see some of them are updating with real-time information so you don't have to go into it to see what's happening in that particular app or program and in this particular case we're running this on a touch screen right so we are running this on a touch screen can touch these tiles and that will they'll push you into the actual application indeed and this is actually a Windows 7 touchscreen running Windows 8 now actually let's dive into one of these apps here on on the screen show me something how i would get into it say internet explorer okay so internet explorer is here we're going to tab pops us right in as you can see it's very fast there's a there's a lot of changes in V it's not called Metro version of ie 10 the location bar is on the bottom here and this is also where you perform your searches you have your tabs up on top and you can see here they're quite big the thumbnails are really easy to see they're clean and from the bottom if you tap in your location bar you get your pin sites your frequently viewed sites favorites here and a key and a touch keyboard if you are on a touchscreen and that's a good point to make here that a lot of people have been stopping by your desk asking you if you have to run windows 8 on a touch screen right and that's not the case it isn't it works really really well with a keyboard and a touch screen if you happen to have a mouse as well it works great with that too if you're on a laptop for example that has a trackpad they've actually included the touchscreen gestures on to the trackpad the way that OS X has them so you now have like you have your live edges here that bring up the charms bar here on this side or previously viewed apps there we go over here you can see we're just cycling through previously viewed pages and then here's our previously viewed apps well this is a little change for Microsoft in general just to actually have by default in the operating system customizations or an ability to use this on a touch mean like a tablet or a touch ba literally a display like this yes so talk to me about why my Microsoft might be doing that what's with Microsoft into or in for trying to put this on more touchscreen devices sure Microsoft is looking at a unified ecosystem in a way that no other company has built yet windows 8 will work on desktops laptops and tablets Windows Phone 8 which we know is coming in September is going to be the mobile phone version the smartphone version and they're all going to talk to each other with windows 8 really robust sync features you're going to be able to sync settings browser history documents will sink through SkyDrive and Microsoft is aggressively pushing that with 7 free gigabytes of space you can of course upgrade to more it's really something that we have not yet seen in this way is there anything that Windows users are going to turn and run from about the experience in Windows 8 I don't think there's anything that that is really worth running and you know screaming to Linux or even OSX but there are certainly a learning curve here it's a new way of dealing with things even though you do have your desktop mode so you do have a place to run your traditional apps and run scared back down you can run scared right back to this you still get your charms bar here and previously viewed apps here but it's a learning curve it's something completely new and that will intimidate some people all that being said Microsoft is making this really really easy to get into they want you to upgrade to this like nobody's business they are charging only forty dollars for an upgrade that's almost a hundred dollars cheaper than it was to upgrade to seven if you bought a computer after June second of this year you can pay only fifteen dollars to upgrade there's good reasons for it you've got a faster operating system you got a safer one my tests on this machine with booting it up to get to the start screen including logging put it at under 25 seconds on average and so when our users going to get their hands on Windows October 26th right now this is only available to reviewers and manufacture well until then readers can check out your full review thanks for joining me Seth for cnet com I'm Donald L