Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brennaman and then from pocketnow.com if you're confused about Windows 8 RT and exactly what it does and who it's for I don't blame you in this video we're going to review Windows 8 RT so let's get to it now you might be wondering why Windows RT why didn't Microsoft just make a version of their Windows 8 operating system to work on tablets well that's exactly what they did with art - you see Windows 8 works with x86 processors and not ARM processors ARM processors are the low-power CPUs we find in smartphones and tablets that would be like the Snapdragon on the Exynos and the Tegra 3 which is what powers the surface for example so by making a new version of the operating system Microsoft is creating a platform that can run on the Snapdragon and the Tegra 3 and have much better battery life than for example an Intel Ivy Bridge notebook or desktop PC so we get the power savings at the expense of performance although these arm processors are getting more and more on par with what we can get on a desktop CP like the s4 pro the Exynos the new Tegra 3 that's coming out all have desktop like performance of course the big downside to RT is that you cannot run applications pick any application off the Internet Pandora Spotify aim that is made to work on x86 chips it will just not run on Windows 8 RT apps need to be re-written to work in this new environment which is a downside that we're gonna see in a sec so Windows 8 RT is the tale of two different worlds neither of which are really that good or or complete so the two worlds are here the Windows 8 Metro environment Microsoft doesn't like using more in Metro anymore I thought that was awesome now it's just called Windows 8 style so that's the Live Tiles that's the 2d typography like navigation UI that a lot of people love it's refreshing it's fast it looks awesome and it makes sense the second world is the desktop and when you install or when you turn on your Windows 8 RT tablet you will have a desktop icon like I do here and it will dump you in appears to be the windows 7 or 8 or whatever version of Windows you're thinking about desktop environment but it's it's not it's totally different it's kind of like a phantom desktop experience and I'll show you why so when you get this going on desktop you'll have five icons to start you'll have Internet Explorer which is version 10 which is interesting because there's an Internet if we go back to the Windows 8 style apps there's an Internet here but they're different browsers they work a little bit differently which is strange in addition to Internet Explorer you also get file explorer Word PowerPoint and Excel and I've added these three just because I was kind of experimenting trying to see if there's any other apps I could install in this desktop environment the answer is no for example let's go into Internet Explorer 10 which by the way has fantastic performance very smooth performance and let's go to Spotify let's say you get your RT tablet and you think to yourself there's no Spotify app in the market place the Windows 8 app marketplace maybe you can just download it and put it right onto your desktop environment so Spotify dot-com great on-screen keyboard by the way if you ever wanted to know what a Windows Phone keyboard would feel like on a tablet this is it and it's especially apparent and landscape actually let me show you that real quick let's open that again go into the landscape select delay there and we open the keyboard this looks just like Windows Phone II and it works very very well I should add so let's go back into the other orientation let's close the keyboard okay so here e on Spotify and where is the download link let's click get Spotify ok and where's the download button here just download the Spotify client ok download now watch what happens down here so far so good do you want to run or save Spotify Installer I'm gonna click run running security scan and this app can't run on your PC no apps can run here because these are designed for x86 processors not ARM processors will there be a Spotify version for example for ARM processors maybe and it's likely to show up in the Windows 8 app store so you will be using it in the other environment which is okay as long as it happens right now there are just so few apps that you can run especially on the desktop now there are some cool things about having the desktop on your tablet even though it's not the full desktop for example USB support so here we've got my desktop Mouse here and a wireless USB adaptor I'm gonna plug it in and just like Windows does on a desktop it detects and within seconds I've got a mouse pointer and to be honest when you use the desktop on Windows 8 RT a mouse pointer makes a lot more sense because menus are small and not touch friendly a lot of the old Windows 7 UI is still there which isn't a bad thing but the checkboxes are tiny and the tabs are just impossibly difficult to press so having a mouse in this desktop environment is just fantastic and the great thing about the touch cover that comes with the surface is that you get the mouse you get the touch pad right there at your disposal now let's plug in something else to this USB Drive I've got a camera over here just a digital camera I'm gonna plug it in if I get it in the right way there we go and let's see what happens tap to choose what happens with this device great USB plug and play support you can plug in printers and scanners and it works well not scanners but printers and mice and USB hard drives and so forth and it works just like you would imagine so here we can import photos and videos open device to view to view files or take no actions so really cool having USB support on a tablet now let's talk about these other things we get here we get file explorer which really isn't of much use unless you have a ton of music and a ton of videos and so forth that you want to manage with a more advanced file explorer on your tablet and then we've got these preview versions of Word and PowerPoint and Excel and the reason it's a preview is because it's not complete yet you can see right here it says preview edition you're using a preview of Microsoft Office 2002 thousand thirteen RT which means in the near future there will be a final version so this is not feature complete but this is this is word exactly as you would expect it you can do everything you can do in in regular word you can highlight like so and then you can go over here to home and you can make it bold italics and underline and so forth you know how to use word it's it's more touch friendly but it's still not very touch friendly again this is a UI that you want to use with a mouse and by the way when you save the default save option is actually now to SkyDrive which is kind of cool so if we go over to file and save as you can see it saves by default the SkyDrive instead of to your device so if you want to save it to your device you can click computer have it safe to your desktop to your documents and so forth but we're not going to save here so here on the desktop we can do some other windows like stuff we can go to control panel but this is a different control panel than the main control panel so down here I'm gonna click on system if I can get to it there we go and this looks familiar right this is kind of Windows 7 issues in Windows Vista and all the previous versions shows that we're running on an Nvidia tegra3 quad-core CPU with two cucas gigs of ram it's a 32-bit operating system and so forth so again there's familiar parts but it doesn't work very well touch friendliness nor isn't real desktop that's only in Windows 8 Pro so that is the first world of the Windows 8 RT operating system and then the second world which is really the primary way you're going to be using Windows 8 RT tablets it's the Windows 8 style Metro look if you ever wanted there to be a Windows Phone tablet UI this is it and instead of scrolling up and down like the live tiles on Windows Phone you scroll side to side and these live tiles have information in them some of them you can turn it on and off for example let's say you don't want to see this these these news headlines be updated so you take the tile you drag it down a little bit there are a lot of gestures you have to learn and you turn live tile off and now it just says news and I kind of like that cleaner look here and now we can scroll to the right and scroll to the left we can actually zoom out if you have a ton of these and we can rearrange our groups here so you can group and again there's some gestures you have to get used to we can move entertainment over here we can move web over here or we can rename things so we take the group we drag it down and what we can do is change the name group right there and we can make new name groups so you can really organize things the way that you want and you can also kind of have more symmetry or less symmetry depending on what kind of look you like so for example over here I've got these white aisles and then I've got these kind of small tiles so two and then one and I kind of like the look of that now the way you get apps to this is only one way you go to the store here and the store really doesn't have that much stuff right now you're not gonna find chrome you're not gonna find Instagram you're not gonna find Facebook or Twitter it's a matter of time hopefully until the Windows 8 app store has all the apps that you use but you never know maybe there will never be a Chrome or a Facebook there probably be a Facebook but there's no guarantee that there will ever be apps that you actually want to use in the Windows 8 RT Store and as of today we're in late October 2012 there are not enough apps to make this usable but let me show you some cool apps that I have downloaded so here I've got I've got productivity listed here here's my mail app which for some reason does not have unified inbox but it's got a really great interface it it's it's fast it has gestures where you can swipe to the side to check off certain different things and multiple actions at one time some other apps we've got here we've got calendar we've got weather and these metro-style apps I'm going to call the metro are quite beautiful you swipe to the side we get all kinds of information it's a little bit laggy here this is a has has some performance issues on the surface RT but just beautiful style apps there's an advertisement and you can do some really cool stuff with this in terms of multitasking so if I do a swipe from the left and then back I sweat to the right and then back left I get a list we'll go there in a second I get a list of all my recently used apps and I can actually open two at a time so I take this well you actually have to have an app open so if I go like this and I open up the tray here and I take Internet Explorer and I kind of bring it over to the side this app moves over and now supercool I get a little little web-browser over here while I have my email on the right it's super helpful this divider doesn't really allow you to precisely divide the screen it's kind of one out of two but it's still really cool to have and it becomes very usable when you are using two apps at one time and so here I am looking at an email I can actually read it and I'm browsing the web and the responsiveness is just is just fantastic now another thing you have to keep in mind about Windows 8 RT is all of these gestures so there are besides the gestures I just showed you for multitasking you can swipe all the way back to bring up your previously used apps and this is super helpful and it looks great and it's a great way to multitask unfortunately you can't go back to the other ways so you can go back to the previous app but you can't go forward to the one that you just used which is kind of weird if you swipe from the right you will get the charms so at any point you can go back to the Start screen with the charms you've got sharing options you can access devices settings and Universal search which actually works quite well and searches a wide variety of things so down here we can search being we can search all of the built-in apps that we have here and of course we can search the web now let's take a look at some of the third-party apps that I've downloaded and by the way Facebook and Twitter these are just web shortcuts they're not actually apps so it's going to twitter.com there and this Facebook icon goes to facebook.com and it seems that Facebook and Twitter have Windows 8 style icons that push you down whereas pocket now we haven't yet Donal Windows 8 style icon so we get that little fav icon in that small little frame now let's talk about some of these built-in apps Hulu Plus Netflix they all work great this is the best game that I found for Windows 8 RT it was ten bucks and you know ten bucks isn't that bad of a price to pay for an app if it's console quality if it provides hours and hours of gameplay this is an app that probably gives me about five hours of gameplay and the graphics aren't even good so this is like I said a little blurry right now this is the best app that I found in the Windows 8 app store that works with Windows 8 RT and so we're gonna go single-player let's do race let's take a look at the graphics here we get the kind of quality of games that we get here in the the Microsoft Windows 8 app store big names for these things alright so here we are and it's not accelerometer control it's controlled with this little joystick and you know the I love the texture of the water it looks good but what you're gonna notice is a lot of lag and hesitation and again we paid 10 bucks for this game keep that in mind I feel like if you bought this an iOS or an Android it would be half the price or less that's a bad precedent that Windows 8 apps see that lag the Windows 8 apps are going to be more expensive just because they're Windows apps that that that's an old model from the past so this looks pretty good when you're not doing something with a lot of action and the frames drop down but this is an example of one of the best games that I could find in the Windows 8 app that's of Turbo Booster now my Windows 8 app store which they need to give a better angle Oh got a whole the same all right let's go back to the Start screen music is an awesome feature of Windows 8 and Windows 8 RT and what it allows you to do is listen to music for free with ads but you get to listen to any song you want so it's like Pandora that's ad supported but unlike Pandora you can dial in any artist that you want and we can use that handy charms bar to bring up the search here and let's search for say Lady gaga if I can't type I've got Lady Gaga and let's bring that away just swipe it off to the side found Lady Gaga Explorer artist we can do smart DJ really awesome music experience something you don't get built into Android and iOS in those operating systems you got to buy music where you download a third-party app like Spotify or our do that allows you to pay a low monthly fee and so we've got Lady Gaga beautiful Metro look we've got songs we've got albums just an awesome awesome awesome music experience and it's around ten bucks if you want the unlimited service with no advertisements so two thumbs up for the music experience here in Windows 8 RT n in Windows 8 another cool part of this is the video experience which is very much like Google Play very much like the iTunes store where you can rent movies for $4.99 sometimes a little bit more you can download videos and TV shows the selection isn't as good as the other stores that's probably only a matter of time Microsoft has been building up their catalog a lot because Zune and all those music and movies and TV shows so again quality is really good that I found this is a high def screen it'll play 720p it won't play a full 1080p you'll have to get the surface 8 Pro or other higher-end tablets in order to do so now let's say you want to add some apps to the Start screen here the way you do that is you flick up from the bottom and that's how you access settings in any apps so let me actually go back to music and you can see if I flick up from the bottom I get to see my recently played music and my play controls and open file and so forth so that is a universal gesture so if I do that and I click all apps I will get every single app that is on the device here including the ones from the desktop interestingly so let's say we want to get a note pad for some reason and you kind of drag it down and you can pin it to the taskbar or unpin it in the desktop which is weird kind of going back and forth we can pin it to the Start screen which is what we're going to do let's go back and see where it went all the way to the end and then this is weird you're dumped into the desktop environment that really is strange speaking of the dichotomy between the desktop and the Start experience let's go into the web browser and this is the touch friendly web browser and it's actually quite impressive so if we press on the address bar we get recently used big tiles of apps that we've or websites we've recently gone to and if we bring that away and we swipe up from the bottom we get all of our open tabs right now on these be touch-friendly tiles and something that you can actually do here is you can choose to open this on the desktop so this is kind of strange it'll load the page in the other Internet Explorer 10 which is strange and I don't understand the purpose for that I would understand a purpose for a similar button and by the way it logged me out here almost as if the desktop and the windows 8 experience were totally different I would find it more useful if there is a button to move this page into the more touch friendly environment of the Windows 8 Internet Explorer so again this is very confusing it doesn't really make that much sense and then if we flip back we can open up this browser and I guess if you really wanted to you could you could open up both browsers at one time we could stretch this a little bit and now what we have is a browser and a browser but they're the same and yet they're different ones has me logged in and one doesn't it's confusing tonight I can't claim to really understand why there are two browsers so we can probably spend another 20 minutes talking about Windows 8 RT and all the different apps but I wanted to spend some time explaining the differences between RT and helping you to understand what it is Windows 8 RT is two different worlds a desktop world which really isn't a desktop world because you can't run desktop apps and it's a tale of a world where there are windows 8 beautiful metro-style apps that look as awesome as you think they do that feel as nice as they as they do but there are so few to choose from right now in the store and we don't know if that's going to change it took Windows Phone a very long time to reach the point where most major apps are there finally Windows Phone is there what Windows 8 take a year two years to get there will it ever get there because it's unproven and because it's got such competition from iOS and Android the developers want to create apps for yet another touch platform we'll have to see but if I were to offer a recommendation it would be to wait on Windows 8 RT apps wait until the apps catch up and then go in and look at the hard we're out there because right now it's just not a pretty picture so let us know what you think about Windows 8 RT leave a comment down below and of course soon we will have our full review of the Microsoft Surface which is actually some pretty impressive hardware Microsoft did a great job with it if you like this video please give a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now