Re: Came for death metal

It might be (or not) related to how some columnists delete comments they don't like... The votes on the article were all that was left for the comentards to express themselves, and some articles got heavily downvoted, which might have upset said columnists. Or maybe it has a completely different reason...

Fancy packaging

Loud designs and loud music, to distract you while they rifle you wallet.

Re: Came for death metal

"I have just noticed that you can't vote on articles now, when did this happen? Did someone hack get angry that the iPhone 5 fawning review was voted down to oblivion?"

Well, it was just after that, yes. I'd be surprised though, Lewis seems like he trolls on purpose, and isn't a delicate soul, probably taking a mischievous glee in being downright naughty. I'd have expected the cause to be the notoriously over-sensitive and combative (such a combo) Orlowski.. :)

Re: easy for children

Considering the UI design appears to have been copied from Fisher Price, it should be usable by a child.

My kid has a Mobi Go... I'm not trading my smart phone in for one of those any more than I'd trade my Win7 work laptop in for a Surface.

Re: So simple a child can use it...

Question is, would a child want to use it?

This adult certainly doesn't.

@Miek

Either them or chickens. I can't help heavily associate the music with the sound of a chicken. Screaming out in horror :)

Re: Win8 FAIL - touch screen PC's will FAIL

The school I work for have bought a suite full of touch-ready machines in preparation for our now-inevitable Windows XP -> Windows 7/8 upgrade.

I am honestly dreading the amount of hassle the cleaning staff will give me at the end of the day, scrubbing off all those child's fingerprints, not to mention the amount we'll spend again with the company with use to sooth the bogie-fearers who come in once-a-term and clean the PC's with antibacterial junk (which I personally think is daft, but I'm not paying for it and they don't break my computers).

Not to mention how it will translate to lessons where you can touch on some machines and not others in the school and so on.

Touch is good. Has been for years. In very, very particular situations. Our intranet-showing communal screen in the staffroom is touch so that people can navigate it without me having to supply mice and keyboards. It's basically a locked-down kiosk.

But on the desktops? And expecting it on laptops? And DESIGNING the OS to use it as a core input method? It's silly. It's always going to be second-place for serious work, and tuning the OS towards it AT THE EXPENSE of normal usage is not a bright idea.

Our Windows 8 test image? I installed Classic Shell and go rid of Metro as much as humanly possible.

Re: Win8 FAIL - touch screen PC's will FAIL

I was with you until the last but one paragraph.

As I said until we started using the transformer we would not have expected it - indeed I would have thought it was a pain in the neck.

But... After just a few months it's so useful and intuitive that I'm slightly dissapointed that our laptops don't have it.

As for designing your OS around it... I haven't played with 8 yet so I don't know how I am going to feel. Time will tell.

Re: Win8 FAIL - touch screen PC's will FAIL

I'm the opposite.. I hate having to touch things on the transformer. Android is designed around touch, so some things are just clunky on the keyboard.. but that context switch bugs me.

On a full PC it'd be worse - a TF is a small thing, sits on your lap, so you're not moving your hand much. My main monitor is about a foot away.. if I had to keep stretching my hand to touch it I'd get tired fast - never mind 8 hours of it..

Re: Win8 FAIL - touch screen PC's will FAIL

My primary monitor is at fingertip distance - as close as it's comfortable to view all edges without too much effort and eyeballing the entire screen is also relatively comfortable. As is focussing now my eyes are getting old. Or more accurately the centre of the monitor is at fingertip distance, the edges require leaning slightly forward.

The 2ndary monitor is also at fingertip distance, fingertip for the right hand side of it, again have to lean to reach the left side.

Touch is a total non starter, I'm not leaning forward every time I need to control anything, not prepared to hold my arms out all day anyway, not prepared to put my monitors anywhere but where it's most comfortable to *LOOK* at.

The fans keep forgetting touch is a solution to the 'where the hell can we fit a controller' problem, not something inherently advantageous, desirable or effective. It's a channel poor, low resolution input device with few unique features to balance that poverty and resolution. On the desktop I can live without multitouch better than I can do without precise control.

Re: Win8 FAIL - touch screen PC's will FAIL

LIke I said, on a desktop I can see it being more difficult and the thought of moving a foot or more to reach the touchscreen would not be good. Dumb terminals, or machines kitchens / workshops not withstanding of course - where a simple touch would be better than a keyboard and mouse. (And this is nothing new, in manufacturing touch screen terminals have been used for years for this reason)

But on a laptop your fingers are by default next to the screen, and that is what for me makes it so easy to switch to touch without thinking about it.

Re: Win8 FAIL - touch screen PC's will FAIL

I don't see it's a case of success and fail - I suspect that both will be true, i.e., most PCs will continue to sell with keyboard and touchpad/mouse, but the touchscreen will become a standard feature that's there in addition. Most the time I want to use a keyboard and touchpad, but sometimes it would be nice to be able to touch directly (e.g., graphics editing, or scrolling an image), as well as for ultra-portable use (as much as I dislike tablets for general computing use, there are some niches they are useful, and it would be nice to be able to use the same operating system and ecosystem). Indeed, touchscreens are already common on desktop PC monitors, seems strange this hasn't happened on laptops yet where you'd think it would be more useful.

I entirely agree that there are advantages to a mouse than touchscreen on any device larger than a phone. But we should be primarily criticising Apple who want to force large touch-only devices on us. Thankfully most of the so-called up-coming Windows "tablets" are actually laptop hybrids where the touch is just in addition, not a replacement.

WP7 is only 2 years old - Iphone sold poorly in the first two years too, did that fail too...? No the sales aren't great, but they still sell millions, which is enough for Apple to be hyped. I'm not sure the market is more "entrenched" today - although Android was less popular 2 years ago, it was still massively popular, and there was also the dominant amazingly successful Symbian two years ago. If anything, there's more of a chance for new OS now, because several of the long used popular OSs have either been ditched (e.g., Symbian) or lost significant market share (e.g., Blackberry). Or who knows, maybe we'll end up with just one main OS and one niche runner-up, with no chance for anyone else - but historically, the phone market has had 3, 4, 5 or more OSs.

And yes, software patents are bad. Same for Apple's trolling too.

Re: Win8 FAIL - touch screen PC's will FAIL

Interesting - I mean, whether we argue it's a good thing or a bad thing, the fact that schools are buying in touchscreen PCs and gearing up for Windows 8 suggests it isn't the "failure" that the OP thinks it will be.

(And let's face it, there are loads of examples where what people think is best isn't what is the one with the largest market share.)

Windows 8 still works fine with mouse/keyboard btw. Metro seems to be mainly used for the simple built in apps - and how many people here stick with "Windows Mail" and so on? The advanced users always go and download their own email client etc anyway. The worry is more whether MS see the new UI as being the future for all software, as opposed to simply using it for simple or touch-oriented software. Though I suspect that if "Metro" is ever to become the main UI for all software, this will only be at some point in the future when it's evolved to include the best parts of windowed and non-touch UIs anyway (e.g., they're already trying to move in this direction by making it a tiled window manager).

Re: Touch input?

I wonder. Could MS "do an Apple" and bring an existing but unpopular tech to the masses... we all thought tablets were daft until iPad showed they can be useful. Maybe, just maybe, W8 could do the same for touch-screen PCs.

I think it's pretty unlikely too, but you never know.

Re: Touch input?

No, we didn't think tablets were daft, nor did Apple bring them to the masses - people were using handheld touchscreen devices for years, we just called them different names - media players, smartphones, PDAs. It was mostly Android that brought touchscreen devices to the masses.

The tablets which we thought were daft were tablet PCs, i.e., the same thing that people here are still calling daft. Now that's not to say that I agree with them - much of the problem with the older tablet PCs was that they tended to be even heavier than normal laptops. That's not true of smartphones, PDAs, or media player tablets (include Apple's), but it's also not true of the new upcoming Windows tablet PCs.

An ipad is not a tablet PC, it's a big phone or media player. But I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, just the argument from Apple.

Re: The Eagles of Death Metal

At least MS got the death part right.