Gadgetory

well hey this is David with the verge and this is the windows 8 release preview it's out now and it's available for download or if you have the consumer preview you can upgrade pretty easily we've seen windows 8 on a tablet before but this time we got to test it on a samsung series 9 laptop without a touch screen and see what the laptop experience is like the first thing you'll notice is that Windows 8 is just more stable than ever before there weren't really big problems in the last version but things are faster and more fluid now multiple monitor support has been upgraded switching apps happens faster and it's just a better experience and feels much more like unreal operating system that's ready for release there's also some new stuff in some of the core apps like in mail you can now pin different inboxes to the Start screen so you get individualized notifications or it can jump straight to a particular mail account but things basically work and look the same and the things are improved slightly in the calendar and in mail but again it's basically the same look as you're used to by now there are few new Metro apps to give you a sense of what they look like when the store is open and populated with Metro apps there's a sports and news and finance apps and they all kind of look like Flipboard they have big pictures and text the reflows to the size of your screen and its really nice system and works really well zoom past is also now integrated into the music app on Windows 8 it's a subscription music service just like Rdio or Spotify and we've actually heard that there's going to be an Xbox branded music app on Windows 8 and this may well be the first version of that the biggest new addition though is flash support there's a very limited version of flash built just into the IE 10 browser and it actually only lets you access flash using certain sites Microsoft and Adobe really wanted a version of flash that doesn't kill the performance so you can't use it on certain sites like Rdio but it's there for YouTube and Microsoft is keeping a list of sites that work well with flash so hopefully that'll get bigger over time on the hardware side Microsoft's also working with trackpad makers like synaptics to bring the same gestures on touchscreen devices to non touch devices like the series 9 we used a really alpha version the software and it's a little buggy and finicky but for the most part works well and it's nice to have the swipe from the right gestures to bring up the charms or swipe from the bottom to bring up menus in all this is definitely a big improvement for windows 8 just in terms of stability and feeling like a finished operating system there's going to be a lot of great third-party apps coming out now that the marketplace is open and if you're not willing to wait for windows 8 to come out it's definitely something you should consider downloading now