Smarter Geek

A lot of detail has now been released about Windows on Arm (a.k.a. WOA) by the massive post from Steven Sinofsky (see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/building-windows-for-the-arm-processor-architecture.aspx). Therefore I thought I would do a little comparison of the features of Windows 8, OSX and the iPad.

Last week Microsoft revealed the Windows 8 UI at the D9 conference that showed off a “Touch First” UI. Since then a lot of people have been saying that having a “Touch First” UI is going to be good for tablets but what about Desktop or normal laptops that are not touch devices.

I then remember the video that Microsoft showed a few months of their new Microsoft Touch Mouse and remember there were some striking similarities between the two videos.

Task Switching

In this video Previewing Windows 8 you are shown how to task switch “you just take you thumb.. from the side and just swipe it in”.

In this video about the Microsoft Touch Mouse the commentator says “One can use a thumb to move back and forwards in a web page or a browser”.

As you can see even though one is switching images/documents and the other is switching apps teh action itself is very similar.

Snapping Windows

Again the Microsoft Touch Mouse video shows how “One can snap them side by side for easy comparison.”

And here the Windows 8 vide they “with one simple gesture you can snap one app next to another app."

Again the similarities are quite striking between the actions…

Touch Trails

Another similarity i noticed between the two videos was the use of touch trails…

Image below shows two touch points shown on screen with the Microsoft Touch Mouse Video.

This is a similar touch line shown on in the Windows 8 Video.

What is clear is if Microsoft is going to be pushing a “Touch First” UI then they need to touch enable as many existing non-touch computers as possible with the Microsoft Touch Mouse or other similar mice.

It will also be interesting to see if Microsoft sells a “Windows 8 with Microsoft Touch Mouse” SKU similar to how they sold Office 2000 Premium with IntelliMouse Pro so they enable a touch experience for as many people as possible…

According to Computer world Windows 7 adoption rate has been twice that of Windows Vista. According to the article Windows 7 gained 7.5% world market share in just 4 months. If the same trend continues then we can expect to see 90% adoption of Windows 7 in just 4 YEAR!!!!! 

While this might just be wishful thinking I think there are a number of factors will make Windows 7 adoption continue to grow.

1. The booming Netbook market almost exclusively loads Windows 7 Starter Edition
2. Many corporation have been sitting on Windows Vista (therefore Windows 7) capable hardware. This makes the capital cost for upgrade to Windows 7 much lower than before when Windows Vista almost demanded a hardware refresh.
3. Combined with number 2 is the pent up pressure of large organisations that decided to skip Windows Vista for whatever reason but now want to move to a more modern OS.
4. If 4+ gb ram systems are to take advantage of than the 4gb ram 32bit OS limit then they need to be running 64bit version of the OS. It would seem that the gaming community have already caught on this this fact as show by the ArsTechnica report that shows that the 64bit versions of Windows 7 is more popular than the 32bit. Probably because gamers are tech savvy enough to realise that to take advantage of the extra ram then need a the right OS to go along with it. While there was a 64bit version of Windows XP and Vista the lack of driver support greatly hindered their adoption. But with more and more computers now coming with greater than 4gb of ram as out of the box OEM’s have no option but to sell Windows 7 64bit.

One of the great side affect of this will also be the eradication of the now very old, quirky and insecure Internet Explorer 6 which will causes no end of grief for web developers and IT administrators. Hooray!

Source: Windows 7 early adoption beats Vista’s 2 to 1

There has been a few posts about some of the videos that Apple released showing flash content being rendered on the display. However this seem to be Apple have a marketing stuff up as another pages that shows the Safari displaying the New York Time home page with the flash based video clearly missing. I speculate that the video shown on the Apple web of the iPad was a mock up of the device using the Safari video captured on OSX.

See the Apple Video here http://www.apple.com/ipad/ipad-video/

CrunchGear photo

New York Time – iPad No Flash Video	New York Times – With Flash Video

There have been so many Microsoft/iPhone/iPad rumours lately that it has got me thinking that what ever this new device Apple is going to be launching on January 27th one could be mistaken that it wasn’t going to be a Microsoft powered device.

Don’t think so? here few points I think are worth considering…

Fact

1. iPhone (and now Snow Leopard) already natively supports Microsoft Active Sync for email synchronisation with corporate Exchange email servers.
2. Microsoft recently released the Bing iPhone App which allow many people to access the Bing services from the iPhone so Microsoft know how to provide Bing services to the iPhone.
3. Microsoft has released a Seadragon Mobile deep zoom image app that is the technology Bing Maps uses.
4. Microsoft has released Microsoft Tag reader application that would be really useful addition to the iPad.

Speculation

1. In a previous article I spoke about the rumour of the next iPhone and iPad having Bing as the default search engine.
2. Now on The iPhone Blog web site they mention that Bing would be used for both Search and Maps. This makes a lot of sense as the two a normally very interconnected and if Apple were going to dump Google then changing the mapping provider would also be a highly likely.
3. As Bing Maps beta is no more it would make a lot of sense that this mean its now ready for production use ahead of the iPhone 4/iPad announcement.
4. Now admittedly this is a little more of a stretch but if Bing Maps is going to be on the iPhone 4/iPad this could also mean we are going to see Silverlight on the device. This would mean that there be a lot more support than just IIS streaming for Silverlight (See Microsoft ‘worked with Apple’ for Silverlight on iPhone, says Goldfarb).
5. Then today during the recoding of Windows Weekly episode 140 Paul Thurrott mention that he has been speaking with Microsoft about how Hotmail is now the only email service that does not support push email support. He then mentioned that Microsoft said they were aware of this and they were working on it. Weather this means that Hotmail will be supported natively on the iPhone with the other mail services (Exchange, MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL) or if this mean they will enabled Active Sync support like Gmail on hotmail has to be seen. But it would seem that push mail support for hotmail is coming to the iPhone… Yeah!

Now I will be the first to admit that I would be totally shocked if all of these predictions/speculations come true… But if they did… the iPad might finally be a device that might just build a bridge over the huge device between the Apple/Microsoft fan boys.