NVIDIA is showing off the Asus Windows RT Tablet 600, which is of course powered by the new Tegra 3 quad core processor from NVIDIA. It does look very fluid, fast and ready for primetime. I love the touchscreen interface of Windows 8 (not going to mention using it on a desktop… for now), and the addition of a keyboard is very nice.

Now, my only question is how it is going to compare to it’s next big competitor: the iPad. I’m not really sure. Until pricing is announced (which is going to be the #1 thing in peoples minds, really), I don’t think we’ll know how these things are going to sell. It looks good, seems to perform well, but I’m still not sold on a ARM Windows tablet for >$600. If it came out at $500, I’d jump on it. I bought an iPad for the same price, and if a Windows powered tablet was available at the time in that price range, I’d seriously be considering it.

Steven Sinofsky has a new blog post announcing the availability of the Release Preview and the steps to their next milestone: Release to Manufacturing. Quite a bit of work left, but they can do it no doubt. Rumor has it that it could be done in as little as two months, with devices available around the 2012 holiday season.

The path to RTM is well defined and critical to the careful and high quality landing of Windows 8 for our PC manufacturing partners. The changes we make to the product from RP to RTM are all carefully considered and deliberate, including some specific feature changes we plan on making to the user experience (as we talked about in previous posts). This is a routine part of the late stages of bringing a complex product like Windows to market. Throughout this process, every change to the code is looked at by many people across development and test, and across many different teams.  We have a lot of engineers changing a very little bit of code.  We often say that shipping a major product means “slowing everything down.”  Right now we’re being very deliberate with every change we make and ensuring our quality is higher than ever as we progress towards RTM. The product is final when it is loaded on new PCs or broadly available for purchase.

Here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-preview

Get started and download now! I’m getting some great DL speeds right now. I’ll let you know my thoughts later this evening. Enjoy!

Skype is awesome. Now that it is in the hands of Microsoft, some people are worried. After seeing the Windows Phone application, I’m starting to worry. Hopefully, with the next release of the Windows Phone and a new version of Skype, things will change. Skype on other platforms, all other platforms, is really amazing and worthwhile.

Windows 8 may be another huge platform for them to take advantage of. But, I want them to release it when it’s ready – not when it needs to be out to maximize profits. Tony Bates has a few words that claim they are committed to Windows 8 and integrating more with Microsoft products. I’m on a ‘wait and see’ on this one.

On Windows Phone, Bates said that clearly Skype will have an opportunity to do some “first and best” work on Microsoft’s phone platform, though it is still focused on all major phone platforms.

“I think their phone is great,” Bates said. “I definitely think we can add value to the phone.”

Server 2012 (Formally Windows 8 Server) Release Candidate Datacenter has been released:

Download Page: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx

I can tell that Windows 8 RC will be released very soon.

Windows Server® is the leading server operating system that powers many of the worlds’ largest datacenters, enables small businesses around the world, and delivers value to organizations of all sizes in between. Building on this legacy, Windows Server "8" delivers hundreds of new features and enhancements for transforming virtualization and cloud computing to help you reduce IT costs and deliver more business value. Within Windows Server "8" you will find exciting innovations in areas of virtualization, networking, storage, user experience, and a transition to Windows PowerShell® to take scripting to a whole new level.

Accidentally posted a day early then removed, and hinting at an early release of the Release Preview of Windows 8, a blog post on the Windows Dev Center revealed that May 31st may be the day of the release to the public. The signs are there, just waiting for official confirmation and download links!

In a post today on a Microsoft blog, Vice President on the Windows Development team, Chuck Chan, touted the release of the Windows 8 Release Preview to the Windows Dev Center. The blog post seems to have disappeared, perhaps because it was posted accidentally, but we have archived it below.

Windows 8 has some features to make it boot extremely fast, and can use the new UEFI BIOS and SSD’s to make it even much faster. Perhaps too fast for some of us that need to boot into some diagnostics (BIOS, Safe Mode, etc). Microsoft has needed to design some solution to fixing this “problem” of a super fast booting machine. I wonder if this is what is considered a “First World Problem”. A 7 second boot on a desktop OS and we’re still complaining?!

If the entire length of boot passes in just seven seconds, the individual portions that comprise the boot sequence go by almost too quickly to notice (much less, interrupt). Most of the decisions about what will happen in boot are over in the first 2-3 seconds – after that, booting is just about getting to Windows as quickly as possible. These 2-3 seconds include the time allowed for firmware initialization and POST (< 2 seconds), and the time allowed for the Windows boot manager to detect an alternate boot path (< 200 milliseconds on some systems). These times will continue to shrink, and even now they no longer allow enough time to interrupt boot as you could in the past.

Windows Phone users: if you are behind the times and have not updated your software on your phone, you’re going to have to if you want to keep using the Windows Phone Marketplace, which now requires version 7.5. Good news: it’s a free update. Grab it if you need it, and you now do.

Most phones are already running Windows Phone 7.5, which was released last fall, and so most of you won’t notice anything different about how the Marketplace works. However, if your phone has an earlier version of our software installed, you’ll soon start seeing an error message when you try to download a new app, or update one you already own. (I say “soon" because it will take a day or two for the changes we made today to take effect.)

If past rumors, which point to early June, and current rumors which point to June 1st are correct, we are just about a week away from the next release of the upcoming operating system from Microsoft: Windows 8. Love it or hate it, it’s coming. I’ve grown quite fond of it myself, with the right hardware. Metro UI on a laptop with a touchpad is a pain in the butt.

The Windows 8 Release Preview is nearly here and if the latest information is correct, June 1^st is the day to mark your calendar. The information comes from Canouna who posted the Tweet and is well known within the Windows community for leaking images from the latest builds that are not publically available.

For those that are looking to buy a new PC from now until Windows 8 officially ships (I actually had a misspelling on that word, which hopefully wasn’t some future gazing) – you might want to wait a couple weeks. Starting in early June, Microsoft will be offering an upgrade to Windows 8 Professional when you buy a Windows 7 PC. Sure, it’ll cost you $15, but regardless of the version of  Windows 7, you’re upgraded to the Pro version.

Hopefully, people will want to use the upgrade and not stick with Windows 7, which I am hearing a lot of people are already claiming. What Microsoft article isn’t complete with the “The software giant….” part? I’m guilty of it, myself.

The timing of the offer coincides roughly with the release of the final Windows 8 pre-release milestone, the so-called Release Preview, which Microsoft previously said was due in the first week of June. The software giant is now expected to make Windows 8 broadly available sometime in the second half of 2012.