You know how Android and iOS have no real concept of "close application", just a very long suspend until the next time you open it? Windows 8 has that too.
But it's Windows. Apps still manage memory the same way, so you start hitting performance issues fairly quickly on a device with limited power/memory/cpu.
The whole UI is gesture-based, which is fairly standard on touch interfaces, but the gesture recognition is fiddly as fuck. It's not as forgiving as it should be if you accidentally whack into an icon in its cluttered menu, and it's pretty easy to completely screw up your layout when you were just trying to switch pages. To be fair, I was using a beta on a device optimized for Windows 7, so it might have just been half-baked when I tried it.
Yeah, all that stuff DOES sound like it could be fixed by the time the service pack rolls around. Which I am given to understand is actually going to happen by launch time.
(Regarding the "no closing the app" thing: Apple's doing it on the desktop, too, and I think that's actually one of the cases where bringing the phone metaphor to the desktop is a good idea -- just so long as there's a way for power users to disable it. Save and Quit may be ideas that are firmly ingrained into our brains, but in truth they're 1970's relics best abstracted out of userspace.)
Oh, and kind of a minor thing, but it really got me: login passwords are still text-only. No gesture or touchpad passwords like you get on a standard phone. IN ADDITION, the password rules force you to pick something which is cumbersome as fuck to type in on a virtual keyboard, meaning it takes 10+ seconds of fiddling with that every time I use the thing rather than the half a second to input the perfectly secure gesture password on my Android. Little, thoughtless stuff like that adds up.
Yeah, I went through and randomized my passwords recently; at first I checked the "Include High ANSI Characters" box, up until the first time I hit a password box that didn't support the Paste command (which is a stupid fucking idea BTW) and realized why I should not have checked that box.
Password rules are stupidly, laughbly bad, not just for the reasons xkcd has already outlined. I hit one site that rejected any password without numbers in at as not secure enough, but utterly refused any character that wasn't alphanumeric or an underscore.
My favorite is the little bars that evaluate how secure your password is, which are of course completely fucking meaningless unless someone actually builds a dictionary into their backend. A randomized 10-character password is "weak" because it has only one capital letter and no numbers? Shut up, you're stupid; I bet you'd tell me "P@ssw0rd123" is Strong. That or error out because of the at sign.
...hem. That's a whole other blog post, though.
As to Win8: again, this is stuff that could be fixed pretty easily; RTM is already one version passed the last preview release, and there are going to be patches for that by the time it's on the shelves.
Sounds like a typical "wait for the service pack" release. Surprise surprise.
(I'm still considering fucking around with the preview release when I rebuild my computer next week. We'll see.)
