Last year Microsoft released its flagship product Windows 7 and it’s been doing really great. And by great I mean seven Windows 7 copies are being sold every second. Amidst all the excitement, Microsoft mistakenly leaked some docs that shows the anatomy of the new version of Windows – Windows 8. Currently the information is too scarce to strongly claim anything about the new Windows but ofcourse, it’s enough to set the imagination rolling.

When?

According to the documents, Microsoft plans to deliver Windows 8 around June, 2012 with the first betas around June, 2011. Presently, Windows 8 is supposed to be going through the planning phase shortly after which, the list of features will be decided. By Dec 2010, the core development based on those features is expected to commence followed by internal code sharing among dev units to make a considerably functional beta product by June 2011.

Next comes, obviously, the bug fixing phase and tweaking the features based on the feedback from the betas. The final product is expected to be ready by June 2012.

Platforms?

Microsoft aims to develop Windows 8 for 3 different configurations, the ‘Lap PC’ which includes laptops, netbooks and tablets, the ‘Workhorse PC’ which I believe to be enterprise PCs used at workplaces and ‘Family Hub PC’ which are home desktops.

What comes alongwith?

It is confirmed that Windows 8 will feature Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Live Wave 5 will roll out simultaneously with the release of Windows 8.

Windows App Store: Similar to the ‘Software Center’ in Ubuntu or the Apple app store, Microsoft aims to launch Windows Store where users can find and download hundreds of application software certified with full compatibility with Windows 8. The app store, what I believe, will also feature web applications and also the applications for the Windows Phone 7, making it the one stop shop for everything Microsoft.

Multimedia:

Microsoft will naturally improve and enhance multimedia in Windows 8 by providing native support to 3D Video, AVC HD, various MP4 web formats, H.264 encoding, MPEG2 decoding / encoding and also HTML5 audio/video.

Hardware support: 

Windows 8 is expected to natively support latest hardware, devices and standards including USB 3.0, Bluetooth 3.0.

New Sensors and Location:

We saw a great leap in man-machine-location interaction in Windows 7 with sensors. Microsoft aims to improve it to another level. Windows 8 will use a new inbox location service, called ‘Orion’, to find geo-location with 50-100 meter accuracy. If you have a dedicated GPS hardware, the accuracy further increases to an unbelievable 3-20 meters.

Support for other sensors include facial recognition, orientation, accelerometer, attention detection, human presence and many more. The leaked document further states the scenarios where these natively supported sensors would make life easy. Imagine walking into the room and the PC automatically detects your presence, starts itself, does a facial recognition and logs you in your own user account. And when you get up and go away from your PC, it shuts itself down…all automatically!

More details about Windows 8 are sure to surface in the coming weeks. All the information above has been gathered and compiled from the information available from Mashable, MSFTKitchen, Paul Thurrott and CNET. We will keep you informed about the latest Windows 8 news.

Subscribe to our feeds and follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.

{ 0 comments }