window 8 Metro App

Instead of the games and utilities bundled with the Developer Preview, the apps included with Consumer Preview are the basic apps you need - mail, calendar, contacts, messaging, photos and social networking, plus an app for exploring your files on SkyDrive (the desktop SkyDrive app is 'coming soon').

Explore your files on skydrive

You can see the games you've played on windows phone and xbox in windows but you can't play them unless you have windows versions

The metro music player looks very like the zune hd player

There's also a Bing Maps app and other tools such as Weather and Finance, Music and Video catalogues powered by Zune (which also give you a music and video player that will be very familiar to Zune HD and Windows Media Center users) and an Xbox-branded gaming section.

Navigate with bing maps and see traffic

Get your weather fix

More weather...

News, charts, headlines and more in the bing-powered finance app

Finance has a rather nice design

These apps are all labelled as previews, and while many of them were produced by the Windows Live team, they're not the final Windows Live apps that will be coming for Windows 8.
Microsoft told us to think of them as representative of the kind of experience you'll have in the final apps, but not of the features that will be in them.
The People app is similar to the Windows Phone tool, in that it combines the address books for all the services you link Windows to, through your Live account or by adding specific accounts for email and calendar.

Create an appointment in any of your calendar tools

You can see contact details and recent updates for individual friends or browse through updates from all your linked social networks in a view that wastes a lot of space unless there's a photo in the update. Tap through to reply or see more details, but this isn't powerful enough to be really useful.
The Mail app is better, although you can only use it with Hotmail, Gmail and Exchange accounts, and while it's easy to jump between accounts and folders, there's no conversation view and you can't flag email or even mark it as spam.

The mail app works with gmail, hotmail and exchange – no other pop3 or imap accounts though

Split-screen metro app views

The Calendar app is similar; it has a clean and appealing interface, with a monthly, weekly or two-day view, and it shows all your calendars together. You get the choice of which calendar you create a new appointment in. But if you have multiple calendars in your Exchange account, you can't choose which are visible.

You can see multiple calendars, but you can't choose which

Rich html email and folder support in the mail app

The switching pane shows thumbnails of recent apps including the desktop

Messaging makes good use of the size of a PC screen to show you multiple conversations on Facebook and Windows Live, with details about your contacts so you can see what they're talking about on other services. You can also send group messages, but it's just text chat; no voice or video yet.

It looks good but the messaging app wastes a lot of space on screen it looks good but the messaging app wastes a lot of space on screen

Keep track of multiple conversations in messaging

The Photos app enables you to explore your images, whether they're on your PC or online services such as SkyDrive, Facebook and Flickr.

Got a webcam; these are the built-in tools

You can swipe through images, zoom out to see thumbnails, play a slide show or pick an image for the Lock screen, but there aren't any editing tools. It's very simple, but the look is elegant (apart from the lurid yellow banner marking it as a preview app).
Until the desktop SkyDrive app arrives, you can't automatically sync files from Windows 8, although you can pick files to upload to SkyDrive in the Metro app, which has a clean and simple interface with tiles for folders and thumbnails for images.
It's a great way to work with your online files, although documents on your SkyDrive open in the Office web apps in Metro IE rather than directly in the SkyDrive app.
Apps that enable you to select files - for example to upload to SkyDrive - use the Metro file picker, which will either make your life very simple or very complicated. When you look at the Pictures library, you see the contents of every folder aggregated together - much like Windows Live Photo Gallery - as well as a list of folders (or you can navigate to individual folders by starting at Computer and working down).

The file picker for choosing files in metro

That's convenient if you can't remember which folder you put some recent photos in, but could get overwhelming once you have a lot of images. The Music library only shows the list of folders (usually corresponding to albums), not the individual tracks inside them.

Browse music from the zune catalogue in metro

The same is true in Explorer in Windows 8 desktop; the Pictures Library shows you thumbnails of all the pictures in all the library locations, but it's a little more manageable when you have a mouse and scrollbars.
The Bing Maps app is very like the version for the PlayBook; you can jump to your current location, see traffic or an aerial view, search for businesses and places and get driving directions. It's a little basic, with far fewer features than the Bing Maps website, but it's very easy to use with touch.

The default search service changes depending on where you start from

We've seen rumours of the Microsoft Reader PDF viewer before; it's included in Consumer Preview and it's an excellent and simple PDF tool. Large files open quickly and scrolling through documents is equally fast.

Fed up with acrobat reader? the built-in pdf viewer is fast and simple

There are no confusing toolbars floating over the page; you can pinch to zoom in and out or double tap to zoom into a page, and the commands on the app bar enable you to search, switch views, rotate a page or see what you have permission to do with a password-protected PDF. This is far more pleasant to use than Acrobat Reader - and noticeably faster.
The Xbox Live Games app will look familiar to both Xbox and Windows Phone users; it has your avatar and those of your Xbox Live friends, your achievements on phone and Xbox games, the two games included in the Consumer Preview and adverts for the Windows and Xbox game marketplaces.

The xbox live experience is replicated

The familiar xbox avatar comes to windows

Those two games are disappointing though; Pinball FX2 looks good, but the multiple splash screens and pages of instructions mean it takes far too long to load for a casual game. And the basic version of Solitaire doesn't even enable you to choose a different deck.

A version of the pinballfx 2 xbox game comes with consumer preview

Splash screens and instructions make pinballfx slow to load

The Xbox Controller is far more interesting. Unlike the Windows Phone app, it doesn't turn your PC into a replica of the Xbox controller, which would be rather fiddly on a large screen. Instead you see what you can do on the Xbox screen and you can touch areas directly, so instead of looking on the Xbox screen to see that the B button means back, you get a back button to press.
This is going to work best with tablets, but on any PC the option to pick a movie or TV show from the Video app and play it directly on your Xbox is a great way of doing things. You get to search the catalogue using a keyboard, so it's easy to find the show you want and then sit back and watch it on the big screen, where it looks good.

Browse the zune video marketplace

If you select a video in the zune marketplace you can play it directly on your xbox

Scrolling and zooming is smoother in the updated IE10 Platform Preview included with Consumer Preview; you can double-tap to zoom on the part of a page you're interested in - this works well, very like the same feature in the Windows Phone browser.
You can swipe near the left and right edge of the screen to move forward and back through the web pages you've visited; if you use a mouse, when you hover near the edge of the screen you get an arrow you can click to do the same thing.

Switch between open tabs in metro ie10

When you pin sites to the Start screen, they have a much nicer icon than in the Developer Preview, and if a site has a jump list you can see that in Metro IE on the bar of commands that appears when you swipe up (or right click). You can also choose whether the sites you pin to the Start menu or links you click in email and tweets open in Metro IE10 or desktop IE10.
The multiple tabs aren't quite a substitute for being able to see more than one website on screen at once and if you open several sites from other apps in quick succession, you may find the page you want is hidden away in a tab rather than being what you see in the browser.

Share from any metro app by email

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