Introduction
Windows 8 has many features, however, there are many more that can be added. Microsoft decided to add more functionalities in Windows 8 to be shipped. There is a huge number of key features based on tablets, touch, Control Panel functionality, touch keyboard, copying of the file and many more. In this article, I explain these functions one by one.
Support for both x86 PCs and ARM tablets
Windows 8 works to support or operate on both the ARM-based tablets and the traditional x86 PCs based on the Intel processor. As it supports ARM-based chipsets, touch and sensors it will work better for the spectrum of devices. Tablets work like Smartphones.
Touch-centric, Tiles-based User Interface (UI)
Windows 8's look and feel are very nice; there are the various tiles that define various things, for example, a tile giving the current weather conditions of anywhere we want to see, also a tile for the latest news around the world. In the same manner, as when we use icons in Windows 7 there are tiles in Windows 8. There are also the touch-centric features that when we touch any tile the tile will open; this is the new feature that is added in Windows 8.
Charms
When we move our cursor in the bottom-right of the Windows 8 screen, the charms open; this includes the start screen, search, share, devices and the setting that we apply in our system. The device option presents a list of the connected devices. In the share option, the user can see the social networking apps and the start screen returns the user on the home page of Windows 8. By using the search option we can search for anything in the Windows 8 operating system.
Snap Multi-tasking
Windows 8 provides the new feature of multi-tasking so that two applications in it can be run side by side and we can resize them and switch between them. And we can also see the application as a tile in the start screen, we can also change the size of the apps by dragging it from the bar to make it smaller and larger.
Windows 8 Control Panel
Microsoft has also added some new features in the Control Panel of Windows 8. These include personalize, notification, privacy, search and share. We can use the personalized menu to customize the tile start menu with the tiles of calendar, music, e-mail and many more.
Web Navigation by Touch
Windows 8 by default is built with Internet Explorer 10 to offer faster browsing and navigation to web sites.
Two Touch Keyboards
Windows 8 contains the two soft keyboards that are the enhanced keyboard and a new thumbs keyboard for non-touch typists. In this Microsoft provided spelling check features so if a word by mistake is written incorrectly then the spellchecker will correct it; that feature can reduce the possibility of errors. The language setting is also applied to the entire computer instead of a specific application.
Enhanced Copy Experience
Windows 8 also provides an option for copying all the current data into a single dialog box and we can also pause, resume or stop the copy operations at any time. It will also give a warning message when copy one version of the file into another type of file.
Native USB 3.0 Support
This shows the speed of Windows 8 that is very fast as compared to the previous operating system.
Better Support for Multiple Monitors
Windows 8 also supports multiple monitors. So that we can stretch our wallpaper across two monitors or display the start screen on one PC and desktop on another PC. This makes easy to switch among multiple monitors.
Summary
In this article, we learned about New Features in Windows 8 GUI.