Hands On with Windows 8 Developer Preview

Windows 8 is a coin with two very different sides: On one side is a tablet operating system, with the tile-heavy Metro user interface inspired by Windows Phone 7. On the other is an improved version of the full Windows 7-like desktop operating system. The first is very simple and consumer-oriented, and competes with tablets like Apple’s iPad and Google Android tablets. The other is the operating system favored by power users of complex and professional Windows programs. Microsoft not only thinks it can successfully walk the tightrope between these two usage cases, but that the result will be better and less limiting than any of the alternatives. I took an early version of the OS for a spin. The Windows 8 Developer Preview I tested was on an Intel-based Windows 8 developer preview PC. This is the first version of Windows 8 to be officially let outside of Microsoft employees’ hands, and as its name suggests, it’s far from fully baked. But it demonstrates a lot of improvements and new capabilities we can expect to see in Microsoft’s next big OS.

he company is not saying anything official about when Windows 8 will ship, its price, or different editions in which it might be available. The general consensus, however, is that the OS will be launched in fall 2012, based on off-the-cuff executive statements and leaked schedules. And Windows 7 launched about a year after its 2008 PDC debut, so a fall 2012 timetable isn’t unreasonable. Till then, here’s a look at how the OS is shaping up at the moment. Note: this hands-on looks exclusively at the OS running on a tablet, as that's all I can get my hands on at the moment. Rest assured that I'll be installing and testing it on a regular PC as soon as I've got installer code from Microsoft. I've been briefed about the desktop code, so this hands on does refer occasionally to the desktop UI, but I haven't actually tested it yet. Starting Up The first thing you’ll probably notice is that Windows 8 starts up in a fraction of the time it takes any previous version of Windows. And that’s not just on tablets: at the BUILD show, Microsoft’s Gabe Aul demonstrated a high-end gaming PC starting up in a handful of seconds. The startup is so fast that the monitor couldn’t keep up to display the POST (power on self test) screen. On the first startup of the Samsung Windows 8 PC provided for testing (a tablet that includes a dock and a Bluetooth keyboard) I had to give the computer a name, choose a Wi-Fi router, and configure settings. Defaults for this last step included recommended update and security options. It also defaulted to allowing programs to use my location, name, and user photo. Next came a step very similar to one you get when setting up a Google Chrome notebook: You have to sign into or create a Windows Live account. This way your apps can tie in with Microsoft cloud services like SkyDrive storage, Hotmail, and any other connected services you’ve connected—Facebook and LinkedIn, for example. After logging in, the new Windows 8 tablet took a couple minutes to “prepare my PC.” The next time I started up, I saw the lock screen image, and swiping up brought me to my login screen. Alternatively, an innovative new option in Windows 8 is to create a “picture password” in which you touch and swipe parts of an image to log in. Metro-Style Apps Microsoft insists that all Windows 7 apps will run in Windows 8, and that any machine that can run Windows 7 can run Windows 8. That said, the company seems most excited about the new species of app it calls Metro-style apps--referring to the Window Phone 7 Metro UI. These are touch-optimized, full-screen affairs that only show their menus and settings if you swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Swiping from the right side of the screen towards the middle brings up what the company calls “Charms”—icons for Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings. You start Metro-style and non-Metro-style old-school desktop apps in the Start screen, itself part of the Windows Phone Metro UI. This shows tiles for each app on your system, and you can swipe through as many pages of apps as you want. This screen appears any time you hit the Windows button or choose Start from the Charms. Each tile not only shows the app name, but can show data relevant to that app, such as a recent photo, the weather, or a stock quote. When you’re running more than one app, swiping a finger in from the left of the screen displays a smaller view of another running app, and if you leave your finger near the left side, it will resize to fill a quarter of the screen. App developers need to know how to display their apps in this and the three-quarters size that the other app will be allocated. A sample piano app had a clever approach: Just turn the keyboard on its side when it assumed the quarter page size. To switch completely to another app, I could just swipe right to the center of the screen. The touch interface on my test machine was responsive and intuitive after an hour or so of use. The onscreen keyboard offers two layouts, one standard and the other with the keys split into two groups on each side of the screen for thumb input. In addition, the OS recognized handwritten input, with decent OCR that any app can take advantage of. It was easy to switch between input modes or dismiss them from a small keyboard icon.

Phones With the Best Battery Life

Have you ever felt your cell phone vibrate and pulled it out of your pocket, expecting to to see a text or e-mail message, only to see a low-battery warning instead? Surely, you've uttered the dreaded words, "My phone is dying, so I have to say this fast!" It may be time to consider investing in a phone with better battery life. I don’t know about you, but the idea of carrying an extra battery or charger around, or even strapping a battery case to my phone is not all that appealing. But I’m realistic. Smartphones, with their big touch screens and fast processors, suck up a lot of power, so I’m not expecting to make it through the week on a single charge. Still, there’s no excuse for not being able to make it through the day. For every phone we review here at PCMag we test continuous talk time, to measure just how much chatting you can do between charges. Although talk time doesn’t account for all the other ways we use our phones throughout the day, it’s still a useful indication of how long you can expect your battery to last. For most smartphones running on a 3G network, the average talk time is a little over five hours, which isn't bad. There are also a good number of phones that fall in the six-hour range, which is even better. For this list, we’re rounding up phones that delivered at least seven hours of talk time—some go well beyond that—which should be more than enough juice to get you from morning to evening without a charge.

The Fastest Mobile Networks 2011

With smartphone innovation moving at a breakneck pace, new tablets hitting the market all the time, and an increasing number of people using cellular modems and mobile hotspots to get online on the go, access to speedy data coverage is becoming more essential every day. But you shouldn't believe the hype: All "4G" is not the same. In a 21-city test across the United States, we found that Verizon's new 4G LTE network is much faster than other mobile Web options, with speeds that often exceed home Internet connections. There's no question that 4G is spreading across the nation, but there's a lot of confusion over what 4G exactly is. AT&T, MetroPCS, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless aren't just using varied technologies; sometimes they're implementing the same technology very differently. So we sent six drivers on a cross-country road trip in Ford cars with lots of mobile phones and custom software designed by network testing firm Sensorly to see just how fast these 4G Internet connections really are. (See How We Tested for more details.) Last year we tested with laptops. For our second annual test, we switched to phones, to more accurately reflect how Americans are using the mobile Internet. According to research firm NPD, as of the first quarter of 2011, more than half of all new mobile phones purchased in the U.S. were smartphones, and analysts have projected that will grow. We didn't test voice quality or dropped calls, which we've already surveyed, as part of our annual Readers' Choice Awards. The tests for this story were all about mobile Internet. We ran more than 140,000 tests in 21 cities. Not all the networks were available in all the cities, as you'll see on the individual city pages. Most notably, cities generally have either Cricket or MetroPCS as a local option. We didn't test coverage either, but our technology partner Sensorly does. Head over to the company's website, or download the Sensorly app from the Android Market to see crowdsourced coverage maps for all the major U.S. mobile carriers, enhanced with the data from our test drives. Northeast: Verizon 4G Bear in mind, mobile networks are constantly changing, and almost always for the better. And because speeds vary based on tower location, network load, device used, and even the weather, we can't predict performance in a specific location; rather, we're giving a snapshot of a few days' worth of usage in several locations across a metro area. So without further delay, we give you the winners: Verizon's new 4G network covers many of the Northeast's top metro areas, including Boston, the Hartford-New York-Philadelphia corridor, Pittsburgh, and the Baltimore-Washington corridor. We tested in Pittsburgh, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC. In those areas, while T-Mobile's HSPA+ 21 network is also speedy, Verizon's 4G is by far the fastest. Outside the metro areas, AT&T offered the best balance of speed and coverage.

Nationwide: Verizon 4GOverall, Verizon's LTE system is remarkably faster than the technologies AT&T, MetroPCS, Sprint and T-Mobile are currently using for "4G." Even with one hand tied behind its back—a 20-percent penalty to its speed score for its lack of rural coverage—Verizon's new 4G network trounced the other carriers. In many areas, it was even faster than some DSL or cable connections.

Motorola Droid Bionic (Verizon Wireless)

The Motorola Droid Bionic ($299) is the most powerful Android phone you can buy today, thus it's our Editors' Choice for touch-screen handsets on Verizon Wireless. If you're looking for lightning-fast Internet access, top-notch apps, and unique features, this is your phone. Yeah, sure, something better will always be coming around the corner. But for now, nothing quite matches the dual-core, LTE power of the Droid Bionic—and it transforms into a laptop or a desktop PC. Physical Features and Voice Calling Handsome and well built, the Motorola Droid Bionic is big at 2.6 by 5 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 5.6 ounces. It's solid, and not too thick, with a glossy Gorilla Glass front and a soft-touch back. Like other phones with 4.3-inch screens, it's a pocket-buster, but no more so than Verizon's competing HTC Thunderbolt ($249, 4 stars). The 960-by-540 4.3-inch, PenTile LCD screen is a bit of a downer. The pixel arrangement makes colored lines look subtly fuzzy. The Samsung Droid Charge's ($299, 4 stars) 800-by-480 Super AMOLED Plus screen looks sharper and brighter, with more-saturated colors and blacker blacks. This shouldn't be a deal-breaker, though; when using the Droid Bionic, the fuzziness only bothered me when I consciously thought about it. The Motorola Droid Bionic is a CDMA EVDO phone with LTE. It isn't a world phone, but it does work in a few dozen countries such as South Korea, China, and India where CDMA networks exist. The Bionic is a better voice phone than it puts on, because it dramatically under-reports its reception. At signal levels where the Droid Charge showed three bars, the Bionic showed two or one. When the Charge showed one bar, the Bionic showed none. That's with the same signal, mind you—it's just the display bars are calibrated differently. Voice quality was fine in my tests. The earpiece is of average volume and shows some distortion of loud sounds; there's a nice amount of side-tone. Noise cancellation on outgoing calls is excellent, with almost no background noise coming through on the other end. The speakerphone is extremely loud if tinny; transmissions on the other side are also loud, but muddy. The handset had no problem connecting to several different Bluetooth headsets, and I could easily trigger voice dialing from Bluetooth. The phone had better luck recognizing numbers than names when voice dialing, though. The Droid Bionic has better battery life than previous LTE phones like the HTC Thunderbolt, just because it has a large 1735mAh battery. I got 3 hours of continuous LTE streaming on the Bionic compared with 2.5 hours from the Thunderbolt's 1400 mAh battery. I'd expect about 12-14 hours of solid use, once again about 15 percent better than the Thunderbolt. These phones are not power-sippers. Battery life can get much better if you drop to 3G using a free app to switch off LTE, though. I was able to squeeze an impressive 10 hours, 35 minutes of talk time on 3G, one of the best results we've ever seen on a CDMA phone. Internet LTE makes Web page load speeds, and other Internet-based applications, much faster than 3G. Verizon already covers 160 million Americans with LTE, and it's announcing new cities every month. In my tests, Web pages loaded more than twice as fast with LTE turned on. Streaming videos from Netflix movies buffered much more quickly, and YouTube videos played in high quality mode much more easily. You can use the Bionic as a Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five devices, and I was able to achieve excellent speeds of between 7-15Mbps down and 2-3Mbps up. You can multitask phone calls over 3G and data access over 4G, but I was very disappointed to see that, unlike on the HTC Thunderbolt, you can't run simultaneous voice and data over 3G. That makes the Droid Bionic less compelling than the Thunderbolt for 3G-only users. The flip side of LTE's delightful ease is that it becomes way too easy to bust through Verizon's capped data plans. In just three days of testing with 30 minutes of Netflix, three hours of audio streaming, one email account, some app downloads and some Web browsing, I ripped through 600MB. Unless you're willing to trade LTE for Wi-Fi much of the time, you should look into Verizon's 5GB, $50 data plan instead of its standard $30, 2GB bucket.