The next big version of Windows got a lacklustre reception when it first landed on a tablet. It looked and worked great, yeah, but was knocked for a little clunkiness. Now, it’s running on superfast phone guts — and it will be great.
We stopped by Nvidia’s CES fortress, where a prototype tablet was running Windows 8 on the blazing Tegra 3 mobile processor. But this ARM processor is way more than mobile — as you can see here, it’s capable of running a full desktop operating system (and HD video!) smoothly. But more importantly, because it’s using a majorly efficient brain, a tablet like this — meant to represent a standard, generic model — will get killer battery life (at least as much as a comparable Android slate). It’ll run cool. It’ll run without that much maligned fan. And it’ll run fast.
This is the future of computing, and although it’s stuck behind a glass case for the moment, it’s starting to feel very real.