“Steve Ballmer has an 80-inch Windows 8 tablet in his office. He’s got rid of his phone, he’s got rid of his note paper. It’s touch-enabled and it’s hung on his wall.”
The man at Microsoft’s helm, Steve Ballmer, is an optimistic guy. So optimistic, in fact, that he plans for a significant proportion of the world’s population to be using Windows 8 by the end of 2013.
Some rumours just never die. The idea first surfaced in February that Microsoft would “shortly” be offering a version of its Office suite for iPad, but that was quickly shot down by Microsoft itself. The fresh raft of rumours suggest that we’ll see Office for iPad and Android in November.
With a host of improvements rumoured for the next Kinect, it’s a little surprising to see that there’s still room for the current Kinect to get better: Microsoft has added face tracking capabilities to Kinect through a software update. Which means, Kinect will be able to read and react to your facial expressions.
Like the Start menu, come Windows 8, the Aero Glass interface we’ve come to love (or adjust to) will be no more, according to a post on Microsoft’s development blog. Apparently, Redmond has “moved beyond” the design, which debuted way back in 2006 with Windows Vista, and is keen to embrace an approach it feels is “clean and crisp”.
So Giz hit up the Nokia preview event in Sydney tonight, and there’s lots of news to share. Alex will have more hands-on thoughts for you in the morning, but for the moment, here’s what we’ve learnt…
Windows 8 is built on the idea that the web has great functions but a lousy user experience — and it uses apps to pull everything into a bright, clean parallel world. FastCo Design’s Austin Carr shows how Windows 8 will make using the web a better, more pleasant experience.
Windows 8 is stirring up a fair deal of controversy for Microsoft. Now, Intel has come out as saying that it thinks that running the new OS on ARM hardware is going to prove difficult.
