Gadgetory

well hey this is Josh from the verge and we're taking a look at Windows 8 the consumer preview on a tablet versus the current market leader the iPad 2 with iOS 5 on a tablet so first off let's just look at basics now Windows 8 uses a lot of at least in the Metro interface uses a lot of gestures and and interface paradigms that are really different than than what the iPad and what the iPad does now the iPad is some pretty basic operation right it's got you can swipe through home screens you obviously hit the home button you can go to search or swipe over to get to search when you're at your home screen if the if the iPad is turned off you can hit the home screen to wake it up and unlock it like that pretty straightforward if you jump into an app for instance let's say YouTube looks something like that pretty straightforward you can double tap on the home button go over here to the music controls brightness control rotation lock control so on very straightforward you've probably seen it before and then there's also in in this version of in iOS 5 you've got a couple of gestures so you've got this four finger pinch to get back to the home screen if you're in an app you can use four finger swipes to go to previous apps or back to the the app previous to the previous app pretty straightforward and you know that's about it for gestures on the iPad of course you've got Notification Center that's about it for gestures besides in-app stuff like pinch-to-zoom and the others on the other hand Windows 8 is very gesture heavy for lots of different things so obviously this is your your main home screen you see all your tiles here and apps you can pinch on this screen to get an overview of your apps you can also swipe up and get your app menu here so this is different for this is contextual for each app so for instance if we're in calendar you get a different app menu there you can swipe down from the top to close a nap and there's the charm menu which you get from swiping on the right side there get these various controls settings devices start share search etc just want to show off a little bit of multitasking you can swipe in apps that you've been using from the left like this and you can actually place them in the sidebar as we've shown before like so and it's pretty handy once you get the hang of it go to the verge so while we're loading this that should be loading in the background and yep there it is loaded up or at least partially loaded up and it's pretty handy pretty amazing actually it's also amazing that nobody's thought of this yet but it's a little the implementations a little tricky but you get the hang of it I haven't done think I've quite gotten the hang of it but I'm getting there it's kind of cool because you can actually read your mail while you're working with another app which is kind of amazing so as you can see is it very gesture heavy UI and you're constantly sort of moving from these different sides of the of the tablet to get around you know obviously you've got the standard stuff where you can just tap to get into something the iPad obviously handles multitasking differently you've got the multitasking bar down here these gestures here and of course pinch to get back not that intuitive to be honest with you I mean four fingers a lot of fingers to use and frankly it's just it's cumbersome to do it this is a weird gesture maybe you get used to it after a while I never have I prefer to multitask the old-fashioned way but fairly straightforward compared to Windows 8 so if you want to add an account in mail you open it up and pull up the app menu go to accounts and then there's a Add Account here you can obviously there's a couple of options right off the bat hotmail Google and exchange you put in your data and away you go it syncs automatically syncs messages so you can go through messages here there's no threaded messaging actually which is interesting it's it's a pretty bare-bones applet Asian and you can look at your folders it's uh it's it's really pretty stripped-down as far as as far as these as far as male apps go but it gets the job done so you can select multiple messages by swiping on them like so which is fairly intuitive and then you can delete like that now on the iPad Oh starting an email account is fairly similar just put a name here get option to sync there now what's interesting is that on the Windows tablet doesn't really tell you if it's thinking if it's thinking your contacts or not and I I don't know if it is oh it is well this might be for my other account hard to say nope it's not these are just strangers complete strangers don't know these people frankly I'm a little concerned now let's take a look at the browser it's Internet Explorer of course on the Windows 8 tablet and it's really quite good quite fast and there are a couple of drawbacks however for instance it does not display our opacity correctly on our some of our tiles on the site so that's a little disappointing to find out but you know no one's perfect I mean up until recently you couldn't see Typekit fonts on android so we shouldn't feel too bad but you know I think you can see here both of these devices are just making you know doing a pretty good they've got a pretty good representation of the site here scrolling is really fast and smooth on the Windows 8 tablet you can double tap and also a pinch to zoom which is super fast definitely impressed with the with the speed at the browser you also get you know it's a little weird you get your tab menu up here and your URL field down here it's again it's very stripped-down in comparison to something well I mean even compared to the iPad I it feels a little more stripped-down they're clearly going for minimalism here in fact there's some weird stuff that that I found where it's tough to save you want to save an image it's not that easy to just grab the image so a real option here to grab this which I found a little troubling I was trying to save a desktop image on of course on the iPad it's a little bit easier so there's some some basic functionality that doesn't seem to be here yet you know unless I'm just doing something totally wrong there just does not seem to be a way to select things so made it very hard for me to decorate my Windows 8 tablet but all in all not a not a deal-breaker or anything let's take a look at search so on the iPad you can swipe here and start searching for something that wants to search the web and Wikipedia here you want to grab from the charm bar you can start searching let's do for hello and it doesn't really make it clear you can I believe you can search yep there you go so it's a little bit a little bit less intuitive but you get a lot more options you can also go and search the Microsoft Store here and there are no results for hello of course very disappointed so less options really it's kind of annoying in fact I've come up against this that less options for searching on the iPad I actually prefer the implementation on Windows 8 so this is the calendar it's pretty straight forward actually pretty good usable interface for for looking at your schedule get a few different views you can see here that Thomas Houston was moving today except instead he was actually working on a Windows 8 stuff but actually really fast extremely snappy you want to pinch the zoom but you can't pinch the zoom and that is the calendar by comparison you've got the calendar here on the iPad which is a little less intuitive and but a lot has a lot more leather in it so I think that's kind of got it you know something going for it you can go to the day and create an event here and you can move them around on so on Windows 8 so a little more complicated if you want to train quickly change the time of something you get a pull one of these guys so not quite as intuitive so all in all very different interfaces I actually find a lot of stuff in Windows 8 to be more intuitive than what they're doing on the iPad but the iPad is of course much more straightforward very simplistic and isn't meant to do double duty as a computer now you kind of forget but you end up at this screen every once in a while and this is stuff I don't even know how this stuff appeared this is just hanging out in the background and in all honesty this is this is the thing that I want to avoid on a tablet so I just wish that that you could stay in in this world instead of having to go back to the to the desktop environment I think tablets a tablet if you just talk about Metro and the iPad Microsoft is giving Apple some pretty stiff competition and it'll be interesting to see what kind of form factors what price points and what kind of software developers ultimately make for it but my feeling is that Windows 8 is off to a pretty promising start as a tablet OS