Gadgetory

hi there yesterday Microsoft released the consumer preview of Windows 8.1 this is mainly a developer release for testing applications some whatnot but I decided to install it on my surface pro right away so let's check it out and see how it works so right now I have one of the new features running this is the new lockscreen slideshow so it's taking pictures from you know a couple my folders on the device and it's doing a nice little mix you'll see them change once in a while but that's a really cool feature so next up we're going to show you how quickly this boots up and you just press the power button and there we are and I'm logged in a little bit quicker than normal Windows 80 so next we have our new start screen and you see I have tiles of all sorts of different sizes we have the normal wide ones the square ones and now I have even larger square ones and very small small ones so we have all sorts of sizes and you can customize in layout however you want if I tap and hold this is the new edit mode let's get out of there previously you had to like kind of tap and swipe which was weird and then you had to like drag it and have a unsnap and moon around so now we tap and hold similarly to Windows Phone and I can see I can select multiple ones at the same time and down here we have options and there's your resize option I don't can change it like so and I can select two of them at the same time and make them both well that one did go to large alright only the main weather and tile can go to large let's say a separate pinned so there you go and you see it's much easier to see that you can name these groups to zoom out and then right click or tap and hold on one of the groups you can't do that anymore you have to tap and hold on an item and then you can name the group so different things here so that's the customized mode and something that's not immediately discoverable on a tablet mode but if you use your mouse and move it around like so you'll see a little arrow to see all of your apps and this is really nicely done you can choose how to sort them most used the installed name I kind of like date installed because I see which ones are the newest and you can search here and get to whatever app you want that way it's kind of redundant because there's also the search bar which is totally new and really nice so let's go back to the start I can type the name of an app and it is immediately selected I can hit enter and launch that or and there it goes I can hit the search charm and we have everywhere selected so it's going to search everything or you can change it to do settings web images video files those are the only options so let's search for Koby and this is going to give us something really cool it's a new kind of a beam layout app and skewness all sorts of search results for Colbie Caillat and I can play music let's go ahead and do that and it's jumping into the new Xbox music app and it's going to start playing the music and you can see there's more results from the web all sorts of websites here Facebook so lots of options pictures and now I'm going to snap let's snap over here there's Xbox music and you see the search results have gone into a vertical scrolling let's go back and the music is playing over here and you see it's a 50/50 split view and we can change the ratio and you see the music player turns it to the narrow vertical format that's pretty nice and this goes back to horizontal scrolling and now let's see what happens when I launch another app hot weather well look at that that's kind of weird it's just floating there there's no indication of what I'm supposed to do with this it looks like a bug but really the reason it's doing this is because I have to choose which window pane I want it to go into so I can put over here or I can put over here so you gotta choose I'm gonna put over here and now the app can load so that's kind of weird here we go little buggy there so now my weather's loading something that I've been missing and using this for the past couple hours or so there's no more online integration there's no more Facebook messaging there's no more MSN messaging in the people up there's still notifications for Facebook events i mean facebook notifications still show up along with twitter but there's no more chat and the messaging app is completely gone so you're gonna have to use Skype for Windows Messenger and we hear there's going to be a Facebook app so maybe that will bring Facebook messaging back now let's look at the settings a little bit over here while we're on the Start screen you can get to the personalized area and we can choose all sorts of different colors you can also choose the background so that's gonna load my desktop background let's go to the desktop and let's change this personalize about the default Windows theme and there we go so now you see the background comes through on the Start screen and that's pretty nice depending on what kind of background image you choose for your desktop and you see the difference here it blends really nicely another new thing is the start button is back on the taskbar in the desktop mode so you can get to that but I don't care because it's also over here on the charms we have some new apps here this one's pretty nice new bing food and drink so let's choose a recipe and you can read it and there's a new hands-free mode which is pretty cool so it's hands-free mode on and just the camera turned on and I can just wave my hand and it is giving me the instructions for this recipe so the camera is seeing my hand and it just goes through so your hands can be wet and dirty and you can still read what you're supposed to do next in the kitchen that's pretty nice health and fitness app for Bing you've got stuff like diet tracker nutrition all sorts of cool things the Photos app has been updated but it has lost practically all the functionality there's no more SkyDrive there's no more Facebook there's no more clicker let's look at the settings you got nothing options it doesn't mean it doesn't even load pictures from other folders that are set as pictures library items this is only the default pictures of library the games app is looking very buggy see this is all squished there we go it's loading and can't see stuff down there and the friends we lost all of our avatars the Maps app has been updated it still goes straight to the map with no controls or buttons so you don't really know what you can do so you might have to do a search or swipe from the edge and you get more controls and that gives us the location and we see we got some good information about that I was the Facebook button and here's the browser so it's loading the webpage that I clicked on right next to the previous app that I was in that's pretty nice feature now I can also tap and hold on I'm link and then you see some options down here copy link it doesn't have the little pop-up menu anymore but now I've got two browser windows side by side so maybe I want to go to Facebook on this one no problem now let's look at the PC settings so there's a completely different layout here who's your slideshow options you choose folders for this slideshow lock screen and we can see PC and devices options there's a lock screen there display change the resolution lots of options here the new settings area is much more comprehensive for the keyboard junkies Windows X will give you quick access to shutdown as well as lots of other great power user features so with about two clicks you can get all this important stuff for the power users but on our tablet we got lots of touch friendly options to the Windows Store has a new layout sound looks completely different now we see some weird angular graphics at the top and it looks more like live tiles so that's a quick look at the Windows 8.1 preview running on the surface pro tablet that's there for now sure to give this video a thumbs up