The Windows 10 Review: The Old & New Face of Windows
by Brett Howse on August 25, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Operating Systems
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
Digital Inking gets a Promotion
Microsoft launched the Surface Pro with a Wacom stylus, and the Surface Pro 3 switched that up to a N-Trig model. Microsoft ended up buying the N-Trig pen technology outright, and they now offer pen support in the smaller, less expensive Surface 3 model.
They have had a good response to the stylus input support, and some of their first-party apps like OneNote and Fresh Paint have great stylus support. Using the rest of the operating system with the stylus was more for easier selection of items, and navigation. That is of course still there, but the stylus has gotten a big promotion in Windows 10.
With this release, the system now supports pen input for any text field. Let me say this again. Any text field now supports pen input. Even desktop apps like Skype can be written to with the stylus now, and that is a big change over previous versions of Windows.
And, the text support is really good. I have, well let’s be honest here, I have atrocious handwriting. Windows 10 consistently had no issues knowing what I was writing and getting the right word added. It also offers a text correction box so you can tap on a word to correct it if it wasn’t right, much like a touch keyboard offers.
Some 3rd party tools have tried to emulate this, but it is really hard to compete with built in tools, and this addition to Windows 10 really moves the operating system forward for anyone who loves to use a stylus as an input tool. Before, you had to use in in combination with the touch keyboard, but now you can drastically increase text input by using a pen.
If you look ahead, you can see that this may also be a big feature of Windows 10 Mobile, coming to smaller tablets and phones in the near future. This should be a nice benefit to those devices, and the rumblings are that the new flagship Windows 10 Mobile devices from Microsoft are going to come with stylus support.
To a big chunk of users, adding pen support as a first-class citizen may not seem like a big deal, but going forward it may end up as one of the differentiators for the platform. For those that do have a device with pen support already, you are going to find it to be a big change that is very welcome.
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jeffkibuule - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
Microsoft can never prove a negative, so there's nothing to say there.Tons of consumer protection laws protect against selling you X and then trying to charge Y for the same thing via an update.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
So discontinue "10" early and change the terms for the "10.1" or "11" "upgrade".chrome_slinky - Wednesday, August 26, 2015 - link
But according to Microshaft, this is Windows Last. All there is and there is no more, other than constant updates breaking things, until the hardware you own is no longer supported. You've EOL'd from Windows.boeush - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
With respect to the new mandatory auto-update mechanism, I assume the system recovery feature and restore points are still around? If one could always rollback to some previous known-stable system configuration, then all MS would need to do (relative to Win 7 - don't know about Win 8) is automatically keep a large number of restore points spanning at least a couple of months - and add the ability to block a specific update from installing again in the future. Then on the rare occasion that MS screws the pooch by trashing a couple billion PCs worldwide, the process to fix them would be relatively painless for the end-users...Oxford Guy - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
Who doesn't want huge amounts of I/O going toward that, as well as storage space and processing power?Or, they could just stop force-feeding people.
boeush - Wednesday, August 26, 2015 - link
Who said anything about 'huge'? In the same way as version control systems, they only need to store the change 'delta' - and they can compresstge hell put of that data as well (fast or frequent I/O on those files wouldn't be a priority.)boeush - Wednesday, August 26, 2015 - link
Damn phone keyboards and no edit function on posts..."...compress the hell out of..." - was what I *meant* to write.
vladx - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
The OneDrive changes, Windows Update new restrictions will keep on Windows 8.1 until they offer the option to have the old ways back.dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
I've been waiting patiently for this, thank you!takeship - Wednesday, August 26, 2015 - link
Is there are run down of the new/updated tablet features of windows 10, or did I miss that? Does Win10 make any/noticable changes or improvements for touch users?