What has a 1,366-by-768-pixel screen with a minimum of five touch inputs; at least one USB 2.0 port; Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; a three-axis accelerometer; power, rotation lock, and volume buttons; 10GB or more of free storage space when taken out of the box; and a Windows key button measuring at least 10.5mm in diameter in the center of the bottom bezel? It's a Windows 8 tablet meeting Microsoft's recently released specifications, which include a new keyboardless version (Windows button plus power button) of the familiar Ctrl-Alt-Del sequence—for domain login, Microsoft is quick to insist, not for rebooting a crashed system.
Windows 8 is coming this fall, and it'll be accompanied by a tidal wave of tablets, hybrids, and convertibles. It'll also meet a seawall of skepticism about whether it can make headway against Apple and Android tablets—and, for that matter, conventional Windows laptops, with opinions ranging from death-knell-for-notebooks to flop-and-fizzle-for-tablets.
Neither of those two outcomes is likely, but cynics and Microsoft-bashers like to lean toward the latter. After the millions of man-hours of work that have gone into the Metro interface, Microsoft engineers wouldn't be happy to hear one PCMag managing editor dismiss it with, "The tile interface really is for smartphones." (Ouch!)
And will Windows 8 make much of a difference in the tablet arena? In his CES keynote, Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed a 32-nanometer-process Atom tablet platform targeted for the Windows 8 launch, boasting, "Four million Windows applications that run on Intel architecture just work on Windows 8." On the other hand, the evidence so far is that—custom in-house apps in vertical markets like healthcare and insurance claim adjusting aside—an operating system isn't that important in the tablet space, because most people who use tablets tend to use them for consumer tasks.
I ride a commuter train twice a day and am surrounded by people using tablets. Two observations: They're all iPads, not Android slates, and they're all Web surfing with occasional photo or video viewing, not tackling productivity work with Pages, Numbers, or other officeware.
Indeed, the iPad's success just can't be judged in the way we're used to thinking in the Windows PC space—it puts an emphasis on user experience that makes the OS almost irrelevant. I spoke at CES with a product manager at a Windows tablet maker who said, "Apple isn't judged by CPU or operating system. Windows users not only know the CPU, they know the code name of it." ("Ivy Bridge," anyone?)
But even if Windows customers are always going to be nerdier than their Apple cousins, I think Windows 8 tablets have a real opportunity to fulfill a demand (one that's stronger than, say, the demand for a third smartphone OS). A tablet that has a pretty interface for surfing and sightseeing, yet is also built from the ground up for office networking and domain login, can be the best of both worlds—friendly tiles and picture passwords for eye candy, backed by an app store numbering in the millions led by the likes of Word and Excel. Not to mention those in-house apps in vertical markets, which represent a huge business dominated by Windows developers.
In the old days of Tablet PCs, Windows was well-established, but Microsoft was trying to create a (bulky and heavy) hardware standard. Today, the tablet form factor is well established, and Microsoft is trying to make the OS relevant. I wouldn't bet against it.