During this time I’ve put it through it’s paces, installed and de-installed apps, bought books and tried to get podcasts (Both video and audio) and used it to read a web comic, and even as my IM client.

I feel I’ve given it a fair shake so here’s my use-review:

Summary

It’ll be nice when it’s finished. Great for reading web pages, mediocre to poor at everything else. If the adage ‘You get what you pay for’ is applied, then you’re getting your money’s worth for a $199 tablet and a free operating system.

The Chrome

The chrome browser on the Nexus 7 is a mix of outstanding, salted with strange design choices.

It renders pages perfectly, it lets you tap to zoom on screen elements and has a pop-up magnifier if you try to tap a link and it’s not obvious which one you were aiming for.

You can even use the settings and specify how big the text should be when zoomed – A big plus over Safari which would occasionally zoom text that was still too small to read.

Youtube videos can play in-page, and screen rotation is smooth and responsive.

And then you end up jabbing the screen and wondering why you can’t close a tab, because the hit area for the close button is too small.

You can’t scroll the Frequently visited/bookmarks/Other Devices pages – But you can on iOS and even the desktop if you have a trackpad.

The “getting started” page says you can swipe from the edge of the screen to scroll through tabs. Swiping right to left… scrolls the tabs  to the right. And vice versa. on iOS this is reversed, e.g “The sensible way to do it”.

On iOS scrolling tabs will show you a grayscale preview of the site on that tab. On Android, it’s the site, or a blank page.

The Hardware

The hardware is first rate. The screen is smooth and slick as a sheet of oil, and makes a dandy mirror for checking your hair – And the back has a soft texture that’s pleasant to hold and run one’s fingers across, nicely hitting the sweet point between having enough grip that your Nexus 7 (N7) won’t slip out of your fingers like a bar of wet soap in a prison shower, and glomping your fingers like a particularly over-attached octopod.

There are only three buttons on the pleasingly solid chassis – Power, Volume up and Volume down – The latter of which get co-opted by some apps as navigation buttons, which may be a little disconcerting if you happen to be trying to change volume.

The virtual Back – Home – Recent apps buttons at the bottom of the screen are also useful, if amazingly prone to being pressed if you happen to be holding the tablet or using the exceedingly good keyboard.

As far as the screen is concerned, the touch response is quite fine, beating the iPad 1 in response,. The image produced is sharp, gorgeously clear with brilliant vibrance and colour – The contrast is high enough that when it’s set to a black background with white text, the screen blends into the bezel making it appear that the text and images are floating on the surface of the glass – It’s really quite attractive, and very easy to read.

Due to having a whole Gigabyte of RAM, and five CPU cores and 12 GPU cores (Though one of the CPU cores isn’t counted as it’s pretty much there to assist the other four cores and do background tasks while using small amounts of power), the response is usually quite fast and smooth.

The N7 can handle real websites with ease, as long as they don’t need plugins, and using Chrome on this tablet is a joy – it makes things so easy and pleasant, with tap-to-zoom, pinch and zoom and some clever page synchronisation between mobile and desktop versions of Chrome.

But if you like Opera, or any other browser available for Android, then you can install them and make them default. That is one major feature that puts Android over iOS – The ability to define a default app for a given task.

Voice search work surprisingly well, Google Now is fun and useful, the notification centre is so good that even Apple copies it, and the way you can integrate apps and have Android use them to e.g. make phone calls or share to their services is also extremely useful.

The OS

Don’t plan on enjoying any audio that’s not piped through the headphone port. The built in speaker is rhaspy and pops tending to fail at higher volumes, and unlike the staggeringly loud iPhone and iPad speakers, you’ll struggle to hear the N7 even at full volume if there’s any background noise because that “higher volume” that it breaks down at isn’t very loud.

As for the OS and the bundled apps… Unfortunately, the whole thing feels rushed

Speech to Text and Text to Speech

The Text to Speech feature which is the second half of Google’s Siri competitor is woefully mishandled. In the default book app, you can for instance have Alice in Wonderland read to you by TTS (Text To Speech). That’s great, it lets you put your N7 on a shelf and listen to your book while you do other things, or take it out and walk…

… but that’s the book that comes with the N7 as a free sample demonstrating Google Play Books. On downloading other books, the speech option is missing.

Turning on the assistive screen reader will allow you to have these books read, at the cost of having every action bellowed at you by a robotic voice, an the touch controls altered to make you frantically double tap to open anything.

Voice Search (Occasionally called Assistant) will return results if you open Google Now and say “Google!” then submit a query – Unless you’re not form America in which case that feature is turned off and you must manually press an on screen button, which will then listen to your query and sometimes reply with a Google search for something unrelated, sometimes a Google search for the exact string that was recognized (Which may not be exactly what you said, because it may alter words depending on how confident it was in it’s detection) and sometimes it will pop up a little info card and read you a snippet of info.

But again, outside the US that’s all you get – You won’t get any of the images that Google showed off at Google IO.

Certain things aren’t finished.

You can tell Google’s Voice Search to turn off WiFi and it will tell you; “Sorry, device features are not yet supported’ – Though clearly they’re there enough to show up as a recognised command to generate an error message.

In the US, users get a nice female voice. In the UK, it’s male. There’s female voice files installed on the device, but selecting them has no effect – You’re stuck with a male voice.

These localisation quirks carry over into other areas. Using the dictation feature requires a user to bellow “Period!” to get a full stop – Which isn’t obvious since Google neglected to list the voice commands available and in the UK “.” is a full stop, and a period is either a span of time or the reason for tampons.

Given this is Google’s machine – It runs google apps, logged in under a google account on a Google operating system, the lack of integration is strange.

I can start an e-mail and specify a subject, but not the body. I can’t ask it to check my Gmail, I can’t tell it to make a call using Google Voice (Or Skype which is the default VoIP gateway for telephone numbers from the address book).

Even though there’s an option to spall check against my contacts list, Voice Assistant can’t handle names very well

And forget opening an app by naming it.

And if you’re blind or visually impaired and turn on the ‘Talkback’ feature – Get used to hearing “WEB CONTENT!”, because that’s all you’ll get if you try to have your email read to you.

Many apps have a hook into the speech API so you can get it to read articles and text.

Again, this would be great if it worked but hitting the ‘speak’ icon in any of the apps I’ve used makes Android try and  ‘auto detect’ the correct language, declare I need to download the speech files, offer me French and German and then die.

I already have British English downloaded, British English as my region and language default, but I can’t get the OS to actually use those settings?

The most closed open system

Google’s managed to produce a tablet that’s fast, fluid and desirable, arguably beating Apple’s design sense.

They’ve also made Apple seem a lot more open and uninhibited about a lot of their apps.

Under iOS, a famously closed and controlled environment, you can easily import your e-books to iBooks. Even your PDF files!

On Google? Not so much. Google Play Books only lets you open books that you bought and downloaded form the Play store and won’t allow the import of any other files you might have.

Google advertises that you can upload your music to the cloud and access it via Google Play… But tends not to mention that this service is not available outside the USA.

Other services that Google advertises but doesn’t provide outside the US:

• Magazines
• Newspapers
• TV show purchase
• TV show rental
• Movie purchase

You’re free to rent a film for 48 hours (Or 24 once you started watching it) but you can’t buy it. And get used to checking to see if an entire book series is available.

I bought the Sten omnibus, “Battlecry” – Books 1-3 of the series. And received book 3 on it’s own with the wrong title and cover slapped on. And no ‘read aloud’ facility.

There’s also no RSS reader, and of the apps that do ship with the N7, Navigation’s first act is to tell you not to use it because it’s Beta and might make you drive into a wall or something.

Not that you’d use the Google Navigate App without first setting up a WiFi hotspot – It doesn't work unless it’s got an Internet connection and the N7 only has WiFi.

Google Now

Google Now is not the voice activated assistant. It sits under the Voice Search toolbar and some of it’s “cards” will pop up if you ask for information, but it’s actually a separate service that just happens to be semi-inaccessible unless you use voice search.

Simply typing into the search bar won’t work.

Google Now is a smart system that uses your N7’s GPS and WiFi as well as other sources such as the time and your calendar and any regular schedule you have to work out what information you like.

This is opt in.

It’s also very useful. For instance it can tell you if there’s anything interesting close by, or where to find a café – Warn you about the weather and tell you how long it will take to get to your next appointment, and even let you know ahead of time that your regular route has bad traffic.

It’ll notice you’re in a foreign country and do some translating for you, convert currency and a host of other things…

… as long as you have a WiFi connection when you need that information.

As for the regular stuff – There’s no way to tell it that you regularly take the bus, cycle or walk, so everything assumes the use of a car.

It’ll happily tell you your appointment of 2 miles away is '”five minutes” travel, or that there are some great Cafés '”Ten minutes away” – In another town that 45 minutes by bus.

As for public transport, again this seems to be something only Americans have because it just doesn’t work for we poor barbarians. It may sporadically pop up and tell me that the train I wanted left, but it won’t tell me when my next bus is – And it won’t let me define where my local bus stop is. It wants me to go stand at the stop so the GPS will locate it then use the WiFi that’s no longer available to fetch and error message telling me that Google doesn't know how to look up the public transport for my area (Which has three different bus companies working the route.)

And if you do download the maps to local storage and use them, jsut watch out – it tends to locate addresses some 100m form their actual location, with no facility for correction.

Which may be part of the reason iOS now uses OpenMaps, which at least will put your address at it’s proper location, instead of e.g. the middle of a bowling green.

Other headbang moments:

Google Voice Search Assistant will set timers:

”Set a three minute tea timer” I say.

“Setting timer T for two minutes” Google says.

“Set an eight minute timer!” I say.

“Setting timer for 6 minutes” Google says.

And where do these timers go? The clock app. Fair enough. There’s no to-do app and Voice Search can’t talk to Google Calendar.

Opening Clock shows three dozen alarm instances because it doesn’t have any culling of old, finished timers. It’s just going to keep making them until it hits it’s maximum limit and stop working.

The Youtube app plays everything at maximum resolution. In the 6 days I’ve been using this tablet, I’ve blown through 564Mb of Youtube and watched perhaps six videos. There doesn’t seem to be any setting for changing the default resolution or asking for a lower res strream.

The Tablet also sucks down data with alarming gusto – One week of use is 2.68 Gb – And only 500Mb was video – 300mb was the Google Currents app, which I loaded exactly once and then quit because it was hard to navigate and wasn’t displaying anything I wanted to read.

500mb further was the RSS reader which was set to not download anything to offline storage, and can’t display video or audio (It offloads that to Youtube).

I suspect the RSS widget I have running is pulling down a lot of content.

Luckily you can specify WiFi accounts as 'mobile hotspots and the OS will throttle data use to prevent apps doing background downloads or force them to warn you if they’re going to do a large download.

The Apps

The last piece of the puzzle is software. To get the most out of the N7 or any other Android device, you need software. Apps.

At the moment Android Apps range from '”Mostly good if a little buggy and unpolished” to “Terrible”.

Which includes Google’s own apps.

Gmail is mostly nice with lots of moments of wondering if something broke as an out-of-theme control pops up, or the Google+ app forgets it was set to notify you of things and then jerkily re-draws it’s screen with lots of placeholder images – Or displays an image with a large icon and some text covering the bottom third so you can’t actually look at it.

Which is doubly odd because the Google+ for iOS app is nearly perfect with none of these problems

I can only assume that Android is just a really nasty OS to dev for, or that it’s considered OK to release beta software and patch it in a year or so. Most apps are designed for phones, there’s no way to filter for apps for tablets, and almost everything looks like crap, like it was laid out early in the design process and then the designer quit to make iPad apps.

Nothing looks good, and for a touch screen interface you mostly find the controls are drawn super tiny.

As for podcasts – Even the top rated app for Podcasts of Audio and Video (Price? $7!) is frankly disappointing. It struggles with downlaoding and displaying content. After fighting with the time limited trial, I gave up – Even Apple’s half hearted and under featured podcast app works better, and iOS has the superlative Downcast, which one day I hope will be ported to Android because there’s simply no competition for it on that platform.

This in fact is the whole Android App problem: Not one of these apps is actually any better than “Mediocre”, and many fall short even of that.

Google’s own Google Reader app doesn’t even have a tablet version, and the scaled up Phone UI made me tap through four levels to get to the article – Then opened it in Chrome.

Overall C- Must Try harder.

Unfortunately they didn't deal with it gracefully, and they're very much leaving users in the dark as to when their pre ordered units will ship, and even after letting users pre order, they are not shipping to many people until well after the Nexus 7 is available on store shelves.

This situation mis management is going to cost Google a lot of good will unless they're willing to eat a few dollars per slighted user and issue freebies via the Play store...

... Which they seem to have no intention of doing.

The new UI looks like day One of writing a new UI when the programmers get the OS to draw a rectangle with a default background and some controls on. Only this time they called it a day and went for pizza.

The stated reason for this is that aero is now ‘cheesy’ – after  6 years of the windows 95 UI, and 8 years of the XP UI, the sudden rush to kill off Microsoft’s best looking UI is a little strange.

However, Paul Thurrot explains that it’s a this is what I’m interpreting as a twofold lie.

1. The blank, flat UI uses less power to render, therefore increasing the battery life of tablet devices.
2. It thematically integrates into the flat and kind of ugly Metro UI used elsewhere on Windows 8, which gets suddenly dropped by the much more pleasant looking desktop.

As a side note, I suspect the desktop exists in it’s current form because the Microsoft Office team insisted that the tablet experience included Office, but were unwilling to create a thematically consistent UI for Office – It’ll be available for ARM tablets but will use a UI that you won’t be able to comfortably access with your fingers, suggesting that the Office branch of Microsoft still expect people to carry a mouse and a keyboard around with their tablet, or at the very least, a stylus…

The main problem is that MS seems to have decided that the absolute best thing to do is homogenise the Windows experience on all platforms, so that for desktop users, the actual desktop will not have Aero, it’ll have the new ugly, badly designed UI to match the tablet and netbook experience, but without the option to revert to Aero if you choose.

This is the sticky wicket – If the flat UI was the default but Aero was an option this would not be a problem. As it stands right now, Windows has three  different UI schemes:

1. Classic
   AKA Windows 95 style. This is a little unfair as it’s actually been updated with each release of Windows, and is still the most customisable, so it’s often used for high contrast colour schemes for the visually impaired, as well as for businesses who assume that once their staff learned to use a program using one UI they are somehow blocked form using an app that is the same but has a different colour title bar.
2. Basic
   The nice powder blue UI you get when windows freaks out and decides your graphics card can’t handle Aero. This is actually the non-hardware acellerated UI that ship with Vista and Win 7.
3. Aero
   Aero without transparency and with transparency (Aero Glass). Without you get a solid colour base that you can alter the hue and saturation of, which has some diagonal gradients to indicate abstract reflection. Enabling transparency adds in the familiar blurred glass effect.

The point of Aero Glass is that it makes your wallpaper become the wallpaper of your taskbar and title-bars, giving you some pleasant colour – And indeed, in Windows 8, the glass colour can be set to automatically change to match your wallpaper as it goes through a slideshow routine.

This is a pleasing and user friendly approach to decoration.

Would it be so hard to just declare that in Windows 8, the ugly, user unfriendly Metro UI is replacing Windows Basic, and will be enabled by default on ARM and tablet machines, but can be switched for the other UI schemes at the user’s discretion?

Look for a redaction of Microsoft’s fiat declaration as more people complain about losing Aero.

1984: WHO ARE YOU

2012: I’m you from the year 2012!

1984: WOW

2012: … OK, Take the caps lock off. Look, I haven’t got long but I thought I’d tell you, you get this far at least.

1984 how is future. do yuo hav an lasir

2012: Well it’s pretty good. I mean there’s a recession but there’s plenty food and stuff. Yes, we have LASERs.

1984: wow i want a lasir wen i grow up an ill bbe all like pew pew die alein

2012: Yeah… no. We use them to annoy cats.

1984: i dont unnerstannd are you an famuos astrount in the futre

2012: No… sorry, turns out that it was cheaper to send a robot. We ditched the space program, junked all the space shuttles and went back to annoying cats with Lasers.

1984: oh i ht the futer it sucks

2012: On the upside there’s so much porn.

1984: i dont understaned

2012: Give it four years. OK, time’s up, I’m going to eat icecream.

1984: astranot icecream

2012: No.

Needless to say it has problems – You need a Markdown interpreter to translate it to HTML, and the format is not bloody good for tablet users who then need to tap through two screens of virtual keyboard to find the correct symbols...

So you need an app with special keyboard or character inserting code, in which case you might as well just use rich text or HTML...

America, a young country, was also infamous for never paying royalties on the inventions that they stole from older countries!

And now the USA is arguably the largest media producer in the world - If not quite the economic powerhouse they were ten years ago.

China is doing what the US did 150 years ago, and selling us cheap goods, bootstrapping their economy into the 21st century.

Authors and musicians who's efforts are regularly pirated paradoxically see increases in sales - Which the RIAA laments, even as they take 99% of the profits generated.

The Music industry has balked at every innovation in music - From music halls, to sheet music, to records and radio, through to tapes, CD burners and the internet, promising that at every step, this would definitively destroy not only the industry but actual music itself. And they have never failed to make a profit every time.

Adobe Photoshop is massively pirated - But the result is that now almost everyone who does graphics has experience in Photoshop and so it's the de-facto leader for image creation and manipulation, to the point where it's an officially recognised verb. Adobe has not declared bankruptcy.

And when all's said and done and the actual numbers are examined, the losses through piracy per year add up, in total, to roughly the profit of the Alvin & The Chipmunks movie - Less than $460,000,000.

Or to put it another way, approximately 1/800th of the advertising budget for the USA alone, which is roughly four hundred billion dollars. Roll that around your palate for a moment. Four hundred billion dollars. That’s a round trip to Mars with enough money left over to give every person in the US $330 to play with. And they’re worried because for every thousand dollars they spend on an advert, they lose one dollar of profit to piracy.

What's shocking is not that the figure is so low, but that the Chipmunks movie made so much!

This does not bode well for iCloud.

Beyond that, it's the usual iOS update story – A set of great features which would have been basic included features on any other system but have been withheld for half a decade by Apple, and a set of features that have been removed from some devices purely to make the newer models seem more attractive. In other words, the Apple 'you are being rewarded with less beatings' business model.

The new OS update is out and while the iPad 2 and the iPhone have similar specifications (Though the iPad 2 is slightly faster), Siri, the voice activated personal assistant is not on iPad 2.

Apple claims it’s because only the iPhone 4s has the power to run it smoothly – though as pointed out, it’s slower and less powerful than the iPad 2.

When the iPad came out, it didn’t have a Stocks app – neither did it have a calculator, voice memo recorder or weather app – Even the iPod touch 1st generation model which didn’t have a microphone had a voice recorder.

This is a point because Apple, upon demonstrating iOS 5 made much of the way they’d copied Android’s notifications bar, and added stock and weather widgets to it But they’re only available on small devices like the iPod Touch and iPhone – Again, despite being a showcase feature they’re not part of the iPad experience…

… and if you have a first generation iPad, neither are the app switching multi-touch gestures, which bizarrely are enabled on iPad 2.

This makes no sense as anyone who’s hacked their iPad to enable them will tell you – They work fine and they’re very very useful.  By not enabling them, Apple is basically indicating that by not upgrading their 18 month old iPads to the new, 6 moth old model, users have branded themselves unworthy of receiving the full experience.

It’s the same with iPhone apps that would be virtually full screen if Retina resolution graphics were enabled, but again, the iPad’s been locked down to force iPhone apps to run effectively at half the size they can run, purely so they provide an inferior experience.

The old-style voice control – Good enough for the iPhone 4 -  is missing from iPad, text to speech, while built into the iPad, is not enabled in any useful way – For the first time you can have it read some selected text on some apps, but there’s no way to e.g. turn it on and have an e-book read to you, or have it read text or e-mail messages.

The list of half-hearted changes goes on – But the summary is:

Apple hates the fact you didn’t buy an iPhone and is going to punish you for it.

Windows 8. It has a freaky tiled UI that’s somehow replacing the Windows UI. And that’s all you’re going to hear about – IT looks weird. It has a new BSOD, yuo can use your finger on it… But that’s not all Windows 8 has for you, and right now, nobody wants to tell you that.

Except me.

A few days ago I downloaded the Windows BUILD developer preview, and since it’s incredibly buggy, I installed it using Virtualbox with the following specs:

• 128mb of Video RAM
• 3D Support enabled
• 2.5 GB of RAM
• 20GB HD
• 1 CPU core

Surprisingly it runs quite smoothly, and I was even able to play some games, video and music, turn on the Aero Glass effect and enjoy all the interesting wibbles and oddments.

Caveat

This is a very buggy, beta version for developers and to show off the UI. A lot of stuff just isn’t working or not working right because it’s not finished, or simply not there at the moment.

Start me up

The first thing is the start screen. You have the option to set a password, pin number or set a photo and then use your finger to draw and tap a sequence to unlock your machine.

Initially you get a screen (Mine’s set to grey but it supports pictures) with the time and date and up to six other widgets, though none were available at the time – So in principle you can at a glance check your tweets, Google+, mail, and IM straight from the lock screen.

What’s missing is an indication of what you’re supposed to click to proceed.

Clicking around makes the screen slide up though and with a little experimenting you can slip the screen up like a shutter to get to your password/pin/login pic. I have no information on whether this is the final system or if a more streamlined system will be implemented.

By default, your Windows Login is your Live! account username and password which lets Microsoft sync your windows settings to the cloud for use on other Windows 8 computers, as well as hook your Hotmail in nice and smoothly.

You’ll be pleased to know this is optional.

Fear and Loathing in the Start Screen

The big one.

It’s the Start Menu, only it’s full screen, and the icons are boxes and some of them can tell you stuff.

AAAAAAAAAH OH MY GOD THE WORLD IS ENDING.

It’s nothing. It’s exactly like your start menu only better. Why better? Because you can un-install Metro apps by right clicking them and selecting Uninstall.

Also, when you want an app or to find your files or look for something you can go right ahead and just start typing and hey! Look what happens!

It finds your apps, it finds your control panels and settings and it finds your files – But this time instead of trying to cram them in a little box hanging off the start button, you get a decent view of your stuff.

Also you get to pin the last N apps you used to the right hand panel, which seems a little backward until you realise you can pull up the search panel at any time by moving the mouse to where the start button would be (Bottom left) and triggering the hot-corner which pops up five ‘Charms’.

Charms are the five buttons that are always available from the Start button:

• Settings
  The settings menu. Includes a link to Control Panel.
• Devices
  A simple device manager for quickly and easily dealing with the stuff plugged into your computer.
• Share
  A way to easily share screenshots and files with people via apps. This isn’t just limited to your Homegroup, network or e-mail – if you have an IM app that ties into the API you can share via IM for instance.
• Search
  The search bar.
• Start
  The start page with all your widgets and apps.

Die-hards will be happy to know that pinning stuff to the taskbar or leaving an icon on the desktop still works fine.

Desktop Dramatica

Talking of the desktop, let’s have a look at the exciting changes that have been made!

First, notice that the mostly pink background and the pink of the UI match. This is not an accident – it’s Windows’ new ‘Auto color’ feature. Enabling it lets WIndows sample your wallpaper, pick a colour from it and then tint the UI to match.

Second, the days of round edges on Windows are apparently over – note the nice crisp sharp corners, with no crappy anti-aliasing.

Apart form this it’s business as usual – though the legacy UI is now gone. no more Windows 95 UI – Though there’s a simplified version still around, which allows for customising the colours to suit your purposes.

Interestingly, the faux 3D look used since windows 3.1 and possibly before, has been dumped in favour of what is a pretty minimalist UI. Possibly this is not the finished UI, or it’s designed to be very easy to read by the visually impaired – it mostly shows up with high contrast themes.

If your graphics aren’t up to Aero you do get Windows Basic by default, a flat blue UI that’s a cross between this and Aero.

Are you a Dummy or an Expert?

Windows 8 is split between being a simple, touch capable UI with lots of very user friendly features, and a powerful, geek oriented system that’s nerd-friendly. And all it takes is a click in the right place:

First, the ‘Dumb’ mode for the 90% of users who didn’t, won’t and can’t learn all the intricate hotkeys and menu locations of explorer.

Note the ribbon and the handy ‘copy to…’ menu which lets you pin frequently used locations to your list of places to copy stuff. There’s also the quick bar in the title which lets you pin frequent actions for one click use. I customised it by adding a delete button. Also note the simple copy dialogue and that it has a pause and cancel button.

At this point a few people are generally muttering about how dumbed down things are getting. now look at the same thing with the ‘Details’ switched.

The Explorer ribbon has been shrunk out of the way and now takes up less space than the previous version of Explorer, while letting users drop down the ribbon using auto-hide and the file copy dialogue is giving a read/write speed histogram – Incidentally showing amber because it’s been paused. When copying it’s a nice healthy green.

Also worth commenting on is that he big info bar at the bottom of Explorer is now moved to being a sidebar on the right of the main window, but it’s been replaced at the bottomwith a pair of icons to flip between detail view and large icon view.

The ribbon is also context sensitive – since I was in the Music folder it had an extra tab for handling music.

Another area where this simple/complex thing is in operation is the Task Manager.

In simple mode it merely shows you the open programs and lets you kill them. Muaha. Muahaha. But Ask for more details and you get this…

There’s a lot going on here. First the task manager has been re-designed to be pretty, but also functional.

You can see that one of the apps is  ‘Suspended’ – it’s hibernating . It seems that certain sorts of apps, the Metro style ones can not only be hibernated, but if you need the resources, Windows can shut them down, like a Smartphone OS handling resources.

Secondly that the default metric is a percentage of overall system resources – In this case, only 23% of the memory is being used. I’ll come back to that in a second. Each of the columns can be converted from a percentage to a hard figure such as ‘50mb’ instead of ‘4.7%’, and the amber backgrounds become deeper to highlight any entry that’s active, making it easy to see what’s dormant and what’s being called. You can also expand the number of columns to see useful stuff like the command line that’s being called, and additionally – If a process has a sub process it’s threaded to show that.

Traditionally, Task Manager had a pretty crappy graphing system which looked cool but wasn’t really worth much, and in certain circumstances, such as the network adapter, was almost worthless if you were using 1mb of a 100mmb ethernet port.

The new task manager has some very pretty and nicely laid out graphs that allow you to see what’s going on very easily.

Next up is the app history which gives you a history of the CPU time apps have used, how much bandwidth they’ve used, and so on so you can see which ones are pigging out.

Further information (As if there wasn’t enough on display in Task Manager) can be had form Resource monitor.

Precious resources

How much of a resource pig is Windows 8?

It’s not. It does a lot of resource management, and aggressively hibernates apps that aren’t doing anything but sitting in the background – even apps that are designed to update tiles with live information – it de-hibernates them for their update and then hibernates them again, letting the notification API scroll the information. Consequently, Windows 8 is idling and with 4 apps open (weather, task manager, picture viewer and Explorer), and all the default processes it’s using…

570 Mb with 98 Mb in the swap file.

That might not seem impressive but it is. It shows that not only are Microsoft planning on making this their tablet OS they’ve gotten resource management down to the point where it can run on netbook spec machines, without sacrificing the cool UI toys.

Talk to me!

There’s a lot of new things in Windows 8 but one item caught my eye, or rather my ear. Microsoft Anna. She’s no longer in the OS. After being part of Windows through Vista and Win 7, and indeed, the only choice for Text To Speech synthesis, she’s been axed and not one but three new voices have been added – Microsoft-David, –Hazel and –Zira.

David and Zira are US voices, while Hazel has an English Accent. This is a nice change and shows Microsoft is still thinking of disabled users.

In fact the full suite of accessibility tools is available, and even easier to get to.

“Wait until it’s out on budget and they fixed the bugs.”

And now the longer version, under a cut…

Good

• For £10, a satisfying game
• Large choice of Aug upgrades.
• Rapid XP aquisition.
• Variable gameplay styles – Run n’ Gun, sit n’ snipe, stun n’ evade.
• Upgrade weapons.
• Health and power regeneration handled sensibly.
• Difficulty levels are:
  • Tell me a story.
  • DeusEx how it was meant to be.
  • Challenge me.

Bad

• It cost £35.
• A lot of the Aug upgrades are pretty damned weak and ineffective.
• Prepare to either sink a lot of your upgrades into expanding your inventory or get used to throwing away the weapons you spent thousands of credits upgrading because you ran out of ammo, and then a minute later, really wishing you’d been able to bring that Sniper rifle/silenced pistol/rocket launcher/pointy stick along.
• Plot is pretty much exactly the same as the last two Deus Ex games.
• The plot twists are pretty much telegraphed in the first five minutes of gameplay and confirmed quite soon. There are no big surprises in this game.
• Some levels force you to toss away weapons you’ve sunk a lot of time and money into in the form of upgrades – It’s nearly impossible to fully upgrade any single weapon because the upgrade kits just aren’t available. And then you find the level designers are dropping hints that you should toss them by removing ammo from gameplay.
• Despite quitting me out of the game and telling me I didn’t have enough resources to turn on Anti-Aliasing, this game continues to be both breathtaking in it’s design and scope and also, fugly.
• No Windowed mode.
• Item Highlighting is a toggle, but it’s advised to keep it on because some things can be interacted with and others which are very similar cannot be, and frankly there’s so much damned clutter that you’d never find what you’re looking for without it. But you cannot alter the colour (yellow) to make it stand out from the background (Mostly yellow).
• All in-game characters suffer from Parkinsons. They constantly jitter, quiver, shake and twitch.
• Adam Jenson apparently is either severely bow legged, massively overweight or spent the last six months on a boat because he walks and runs in an incredible, eye straining rolling gait that suggests he’s swaying side to side dramatically. There’s no option to turn this off.
• ‘Pocket Secretary’ items often vanish from your log list. This is slightly problematic as they most often  contain the access codes or mission continuation info. I picked up one from a downed enemy, read it and was told I should read it some more before it’d update my waypoint. No matter how many times I read the entry the waypoint would not update. Fortunately like most of the plot points in game it was ham-fistedly obvious.
• At least one mission cannot be completed by any means other than having a stupidly high hacking skill.
• Boss fights: Oh dear.
• Boss fights are often a dramatic way to end a story sub arc and allow the player to test out that special superweapon they’ve been dragging around for the last hour.
  However if your Boss is basically an invisible super soldier who can take a hundred bullets to the face and laugh it off while firing three types of grenade out of his ass and hosing the room down with his chaingun-nipples, it’d be really nice if your main character didn’t die from say… Taking two rounds to the leg. Also if you offer an Armour upgrade, it really aught to protect you. Even slightly.
• There’s three ways Deus Ex used to deal with bosses:
1. Go toe to toe and see who’s upgrades were better
2. Use some clever environmental trap.
3. Pick up some information and evade the fight alltogether.
• In DX:HR your option is basically to die a lot then say ‘Fuck it’ and hammer the ‘Fire Typhoon Aug’ four or five times, and walk away. This is shitty design. The fact is you can tazer and tranq and EMP and gas the Boss and they will always still die of massive gunshot injury.
• Too many no win-scenarios were provided apart from ‘Kill everything that moves’. If your game’s major feature is ‘find alternate routes’ and ‘look for other ways to cccomplish your goals’ (Both of which are handy laoding screen tips). maybe you should allow for htat to happen?
• The ending is a throwaway – In a game full of fully rendered cut scenes with dramatic Bladerunner Noir visuals, they went with the cheapest, nastiest and least satisfying ending. It’s like sitting through Avatar and then the last five minutes is two interns with blue sock puppets.