4 out of 5 stars

Before reviewing the MacBook Air, I hated trackpads. It’s just a technology that I feel never really cemented itself with us, as human beings, because it requires touch, and every touch is different. A very dry finger glides well, but a moist one may not. Mushy fingertips don’t work particularly well, and stubby ones don’t always read on the surface. Touch interfaces are quickly becoming the preferred method of digital communication through smartphones and tablets, but the trackpad remains mostly unchanged. They come in many shapes and sizes and textures, with nearly all the same highlights and limitations. Frankly, I’m far more partial to what IBM dubbed Trackpoint.

That said, it’s hard to use a laptop these days without using a trackpad, so like everyone I adjusted. There are good and bad trackpads, and frankly too many reasons not to use them. Logitech’s Wireless Touchpad is, with exception to Apple products, the first trackpad I actually enjoy using.

Like Apple’s own Magic Trackpad, the Touchpad is a wireless trackpad built specifically with touch-features in mind. That means two-finger scrolling, three- and four-finger gestures, and the simplicity of a long-lasting wireless user interface device. In this respect Logitech has hit the metaphorical nail on the head. The Wireless Touchpad is large and comfortable to use, all of its features and functions work exactly as expected. The Touchpad is a good, solid product, through and through.

That being said, Windows 7 isn’t suited for good trackpad use. OS X is. The difference between them is monumental. There is no smooth scrolling, few gestures, and minimal support for multitouch devices. This, coming from a company who three years ago revealed the Surface touch-only table computer. Yet there are still around ten touch gestures for the OS. It’s disheartening, to say the least.

Which is why it’s surprising Logitech has made the Touchpad for Windows 7 only. $20 cheaper than Apple’s Magic Trackpad, the Wireless Touchpad could easily compete on OS X based solely on features, let alone price. Even without Bluetooth compliance, lord knows how many Mac users have available USB slots that they are willing to spare, and it’s not hard to imagine a Bluetooth version selling for $5-$10 more. Limiting the Wireless Touchpad to Windows 7, and undoubtedly Windows 8 when it releases, is a significant limitation.

Logitech’s use of the USB radio – part of their “Unifying receiver” dongle, which works with about two dozen Logitech keyboards and mice – will simplify your current or future wireless Logitech products by sending data through a single dongle, though I myself am still stuck with the G700 and G930 on separate dongles because gaming hardware requires more bandwidth and faster rates. Still, the dongle is tiny and is more than adequate for any desktop or laptop.

The only real problem I’ve faced with the Wireless Touchpad has been the area of the touch-sensitive surface. The 5″ area is large, but the edges aren’t pronounced and impossible to feel. Especially when using multi-touch gestures, it’s far too easy to have one finger out of bounds and accidentally do a three-finger ‘back’ command instead of a four-finger ‘screen left’ command. It’s an easy fix as we’ve seen on plenty of laptops: make the physical area for the actual trackpad lower than the rest of the surface. That way, users have a tactile feeling for the edges.

Logitech’s Wireless Touchpad is a fine piece of hardware. The trackpad is sensitive and accurate, the two mouse buttons large and tactile, though the pad itself is easy to slip out of. The Touchpad is comfortable at a distance or up close, and especially from the couch where plenty are expected to use it. Windows, however, has little love for touch-sensitive devices and frankly that severely limits what you can do with the Touchpad. It is the new de-facto mouse when not at a table or flat surface, but besides that, a mouse is a mouse is a mouse. I like it and recommend it, but it’s not magic.

You can buy the Logitech Wireless Touchpad from Amazon for $50.

Pros:

• Solid design, tactile buttons, comfortable to use for long periods on the couch or at a table
• It works just right! Wireless signal is strong at a distance of 20′

Cons:

• Windows 7 isn’t suited for touch-sensitive gestures; no OS X support
• Trackpad square has no tactile bounds, its too easy to slide a finger off the sensitive portion

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1.5 out of 5 stars

When I undertook a month period without a laptop – only using an iPad – the most difficult readjustment when I returned to my laptop was to stop touching the screen. On the iPad, it’s very convenient to just flick the screen or click on links instead of using a mouse. The Dell Inspiron Duo offers a similar feature, utilizing a capacitive touchscreen capable of bringing together the best of both tablets and netbooks. Does it succeed, or fall flat on its face?

Dell’s Inspiron Duo is a netbook with a capacitive touchscreen meant to bridge the gap between tablets and netbooks. Many people, myself included, have been looking for a laptop solution with tablet qualities (or vice versa), but the major setback has been with Windows. Microsoft has consistently built operating systems capable of supporting tablets and touchscreens, but those controls have always been secondary to standard computing UI, the keyboard and mouse. Of course, Apple changed tablets forever by succeeding with the iPhone, and then the iPad.

The Inspiron Duo, behind the iPad and Galaxy Tablet

Netbooks are known for being slow, but are also capable of running Windows 7, though generally they run the lightest version, Home Starter. For touchscreen functions to work, Dell was forced to use the heavier Home Premium version of Windows on the Duo. Dell’s own software for touchscreen functions is always on by default, in case users flip the screen around and want those extra features. And, of course, Dell included bloatware like McAfee, a highly-rated but top-heavy virus protection application.

The Duo comes with a 1.5GHz dual core Atom processor, 2GB of RAM and integrated graphics. This may sound fast for a netbook, but as described below the Duo is actuallysluggish. When I first started the Duo, it booted so slowly that my initial thought was to reformat the netbook, thereby wiping out all bloatware and speeding up the machine. But I couldn’t because I needed to test the laptop as is. In addition, doing so would remove the necessary touch software.

Inspiron Duo on the bottom is easily 3 times as thick as the iPad, and heavier than both true tablets

After shutting down most of the unnecessary applications (through MSconfig), the Duo ran much better, though it’s still slow. Saving Word documents takes 5-7 seconds, some 480p and 720p streaming video stutters uncontrollably, even after fully buffering. General computing is a pain. All testing was performed after the Duo had been cleaned and the slow software had been shut down without actually uninstalling or removing any applications.

Touchscreen

The first thing I noticed about the touchscreen is that it needed calibration. Unlike most tablets, Windows requires calibration to read touch presses accurately. Dell even saw fit to enlarge the display 125% so that users would be able to use the touch display more precisely, which also stretches everything displayed. Images and text are all skewed and pixelated in the default view, and I immediately reset the screen to 100%.

Once calibrated, the touchscreen works extremely well. Its pinpoint accurate, the 10.1” screen is smooth and flows easily. The technology behind the touchscreen seems to work as well as any other touchscreen but the software behind it is a big letdown.

This doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Anyone familiar with Windows-based touchpads knows that the software was built specifically for two things: to be used with a keyboard and mouse with touch gestures the secondary option; and to be used with a stylus for touchscreens. This was how Bill Gates envisioned it over two decades ago and how Windows 7 was built. That is, in my experience, the core of Windows for touch controls.

Knowing this, Windows 7 on a machine like the Duo makes the Duo suffer. In many respects, I could never replace an iPad with the Duo. In other words, the Duo may look and act like a tablet, but it isn’t a tablet. It uses software that’s still based on a premise that no longer exists today. The Duo will always be a “tablet PC”, which business people bought ten years ago and never used. Anyone interested in replacing their current tablet, or anyone who wants to get a tablet with all the added benefits of a full-fledged laptop, needs to define what it is they want in a device before making that purchase decision.

Aside from the touch capabilities of the screen, the viewing angles on the Duo are awful. Built with tablets in mind, it’s a no-brainer that viewing angles should be a highlight for the Duo, but no. Tilt the screen too far or sit at too high an angle and the colors invert. Turn it a bit too far to the right or left and the screen, or at least part of it, will appear with faded colors. Just getting the sweet spot on the Duo is a problem, especially when holding the laptop like a tablet. It doesn’t just work ?????, and that’s a huge problem.

The whole issue with the screen is far worse when thinking about sharing pictures or video. I once used the iPad for a presentation instead of a projector and the results were exceptional. I would never even consider using the Duo in a similar fashion. The viewing angle is too poor to take into the field. Business users interested in wowing their audiences will not find that oomph in the Duo.

General Use and Performance

When Dell first announced the Duo, I told my brother to hold off on buying an iPad. He wanted to buy one to stream video comfortably, but wasn’t interested in paying for Hulu+. The Duo is a smart choice for such users because it’s still a laptop, and will stream any media no matter what major media conglomerates say or do. That is perhaps the best thing about the Duo, that users can watch streaming video on it as if it were a tablet, with all the benefits of using a laptop, and none of the extra cost.

The left side of the Duo, which has the flip-open USB and 3.5mm auxiliary ports…

And the right side, even emptier than the left with just the power button

As explained earlier, the Duo has a few major setbacks when it comes to general use. First is how bloated it is, which can only be partially corrected. If interested users have no qualms about skipping the included Dell Stage software, it would be smart to reformat, as long as you do so with a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium or better. I can’t guarantee that setting up the Duo as a Tablet laptop will be easy, however, as I didn’t do so for this review.

The Duo has2 USB ports, a single 3.5mm auxiliary port for stereo sound, and the power connector. No VGA/HDMI out, no Ethernet port, no media card reader…we get bubkis. On my first day playing with the Duo, I wanted to stream video to the big screen and couldn’t. “Wi-Fi only” means that even at home data transfer speeds are throttled(limited to) to whatever your wireless network can handle. Furthermore, the connectors have flip-open plastic covers for protection, which just gets in the way.

Using a laptop fulltime with just 2 USB ports is difficult, though having access to the touchscreen does eliminate the need for a dedicated mouse. As I did months ago with the iPad, I could now scroll – albeit less comfortably- by dragging the scroll bar up and down – instead of relying on the middle mouse scroll wheel. In fact, all of the main mouse functions can be achieved using the touchscreen. Right clicking uses the same three-second gesture to activate as it does on Microsoft’s Kinect: hold for three seconds and the left click becomes a right click. This is a slow process, and it’s more convenient to just use the touchpad’s buttons instead.

Even an episode of Castle is ruined thanks to the poor viewing angles on the Duo

The keyboard is decent, even good when compared to netbooks. The keys are small and easy to press, but at the same time there’s too much space between the keys which makes it too easy to misfire. The touchpad is frighteningly small. The surface is rough and it’s so tiny that it almost looks like Dell wants people use the touchscreen instead. As admirable as that may be, Windows 7 is just not built for it.

One larger concern in general use is not the screen size, but the multiple bezels. Like all smartphones, the glass and screen are separated by a slight black region of glass. On the Duo, that amounts to another square inch added to the entire glass plate. Then the actual frame, the true bezel, adds another square inch. The 10.1” screen looks tiny when compared to the laptop’s body; there’s a 10” screen on a 13” case. This gives users a larger perceived size for the display, in effect making the computer appear bulky and the screen tiny.

Forgive me for sounding like Jeff Foxworthy, but you can tell a computer runs slowly when it takes a full 10 seconds for the Windows search bar to find Word. There are load times for everything, from Office applications to loading webpages. Yes, even some heavier websites run slowly because the hardware needs extra time to process it. Physically turning the Duo to portrait mode takes anywhere from 4-7 seconds to switch over completely. Saving documents takes just as long. Some high quality 480p video and average quality 720p video will stutter, and are unwatchable.

If you require the performance an average netbook can offer, the Duo is on par with last year’s high-end models. If, however, you plan to use it as a media and viewing device, as long as you don’t expect anything better than DVD quality video and never have to share, there won’t be a problem, just some lag.

Battery Life

Performance on the Duo is mediocre, and sometimes tragic. Netbooks, in my opinion, don’t offer enough to warrant a purchase, especially when compared to recent inexpensive ultraportable notebooks. However, the key differentiator between the two is battery life. No ultraportable can boast the 8-12 hour battery life some netbooks can, and a 10-15% drop in performance is worth the extended use. Who wouldn’t want to compute throughout an entire transatlantic flight?

The Duo fails on both sides of this argument, taking the maximum drop in performance and offering a sad joke for battery life.

The average tested battery life of the Duo is between two to three and a half hours, depending on use. I can’t sit in a café and watch a whole movie over Wi-Fi. It couldn’t last through the entire Superbowl while word processing. Battery life just stinks. Everyone claims they buy tablets and netbooks for the apps, the small size, usability…but the reality is we want great battery life. Swap ten hours with five and nobody will buy that netbook or tablet. So what the hell happened with the Duo?

The main point for battery life is this: the Duo has a fraction of what tablets and netbooks offer. At best, you’ll be able to squeeze out three and a half hours with minimal Wi-Fi use and the lowest screen brightness. At worst, with heavy Wi-Fi and media use (such as streaming video) and average brightness, you’ll get two hours. For a netbook or tablet, battery life on the Duo is an absolute failure.

Docking Station

The Duo has an accessory docking station from JBL, which is sold with the Duo for an additional $100. It acts as both a speaker system for the Duo and a dock, with an Ethernet port, two additional USB ports, an auxiliary port and a media cart reader. The dock, as you can see in the image above, is made specifically for the touchscreen design, so you won’t be plugging it in and typing away when connected.

The JBL dock is a convenient way to plug in the Duo while showing off the touchscreen. The irony in this case is that, as mentioned earlier, Windows 7 just doesn’t successfully handle a touch-only interface which limits the Duo when solely using the touchscreen.

As a speaker dock, it will play any music or videos and produce better sound than the average laptop speakers. The sound quality from the JBL speaker dock is decent. Sound isn’t rich – the dock isn’t always pitch-perfect in the mid-range and high notes are a bit sharp – but the audio is clean. The dock also does a good job of acting as a sort of stand and speaker so that you can view media on it. If Dell’s software supported it, it could make a good digital photo album. Right now, however, using the speaker dock for anything other than a music player seems farfetched.

If the Duo is going to be your sole laptop and you’d like better audio when at home, get the docking station. If not, pass on it. The extra USB ports and memory card reader don’t help without external monitor support, and having a faster internet connection through cabled Ethernet is not worth the $100 laptop stand.

Conclusion

The Dell Inspiron Duo has a lot of promise. So much promise that I told my brother and some friends to wait for it before deciding on a tablet-like device. And it does have many great uses. It’s impossible to watch a plenty of streaming media without paying on a tablet, while the Duo has no such restrictions. I like using the touchscreen and being able to scroll, to quickly tap on windows, and to use certain gestures. It’s a brave new world and Dell has certainly pushed forward in an excellent direction.

But the company bit off more than it could chew. Windows 7 simply isn’t ready to compete with Android and iOS, let alone other upcoming mobile operating systems and hardware, like the Blackberry Playbook tablet or Android’s soon-to-be-released Honeycomb firmware upgrade specifically for tablets. Just comparing Windows 7 against the three year old iOS puts Microsoft’s beloved operating system to shame. Dell clearly had little choice if they wanted to include the best features of a regular netbook with the touch capabilities of a tablet.

Dell is, however, responsible for the preposterous battery life and slower-than-life processing. At $550, the Duo is certainly competitively priced with tablets, but if anyone walked into a Best Buy and tried the Duo, they would walk away instantly. The Duo isn’t smooth, it isn’t fast, and in nearly every way it pales in comparison to older, less powerful hardware. There are plenty of people who would be happy to pay double the price for a more powerful, faster machine, but it’s clear the company was aiming for a certain price point. Because of this, the Duo is seriously handicapped against even the weakest of competitors.

All that would be secondary if the battery life were at least three times as long as it’s current minimum of two hours. With at least six hours of battery life, the poor performance could be overlooked. After all, we all want to continue typing or touching away. But the Duo can’t even stream a 2+ hour movie. Slow performance and awful battery life are such major setbacks that it makes the terrible viewing angles almost insignificant.

I have no doubt that the Dell Inspiron Duo will live on as a stepping stone for other, similar devices in the future. Even today, as I type this review using the Duo, passersby are stunned by the rotating screen and ask how it works. There is something magical about it that attracts the eye. For now, however, it’s best to leave it as a fond memory and to look forward to what the future will bring.

The problem with any good tablet, or any touchscreen for that matter, is the lack of a physical keyboard and docking station.  Plus you need a reasonably light operating system that doesn’t drain battery life and won’t drive you nuts when it comes to completing a task.

The Ideapad U1 from Lenovo is a tablet meets desktop computer thanks to its dual OS and optional docking station.  When docked the Ideapad U1 can provide a full blown Windows 7 experience.  When undocked (tablet form) it utilizes the Android OS, 2.2 to be exact.

Lenovo is promising an 8 hour battery life between charges thanks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 1.3Ghz processor and 10.1-inch HD multitouch screen.  There are also dual cameras (a 2MP front facing and 5mp backwards facing), weighs less than 2lbs and measures .51-inches thin.

There’s no word on a price, though it looks like this product will be specifically offered in China with a comparable version set for a US release due in the future.  Two price options will be available, with the more expensive one including the dock and keyboard.

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The Microsoft Touch Mouse is not particularly special upon first glance. It has only the two main buttons – no scroll wheel, no middle mouse button, no thumb buttons. It is ambidextrous, but without anything on the sides, that hardly matters. It also only has a DPI range of 1000. But if you look closely at the top (below picture), you’ll see a series of X’s and dots that outlay the special feature of the Touch Mouse: a touch-sensitive region.

This area, which covers 60% of the mouse from the top, uses capacitive touch technology to register multitouch gestures. Best known currently on smartphones, capacitive touchscreens have typically been glass, but the technology doesn’t need a glass surface. Microsoft opted against a glass surface because, as anyone with a touchscreen phone has learned the hard way, the glass becomes abrasive with excess heat, and having a mouse becoming uncomfortable like this was out of the question.

There are about nine current functions of the touch features on this mouse, including taking the place of thumb buttons and the scroll wheel. And like some current trackpads, momentum scrolling (scrolling up or down hard, causing the page to continue scrolling after letting go) is also available, something I like very much after Logitech introduced frictionless scroll wheels. The thumb buttons are replaced with a swipe up or down with the thumb on the mouse’s side. To my knowledge, there is currently no middle mouse button, but I’ll update with a confirmation.

Other touch functions are specific to Windows 7. Two fingers controls specific windows. For example, a highlighted window can be maximized, minimized, or put to the right or left of the screen by swiping two fingers up, down, right or left, respectively. Three finger gestures control the entire desktop, so three fingers sliding up shows all open windows while three fingers sliding down cleans the desktop.

I tried out the Touch Mouse and it works flawlessly, albeit some of the Windows limitations may end up being frustrating and feeling outdated. In just seconds I was able to use all of the nine functions. It’s remarkably intuitive and simple, and the feel of the mouse is such that sliding one or more fingers up and down the capacitive surface is not bothersome in the slightest. I could easily see myself replacing my current mouse for this…of course, if I stuck with any one mouse.

The now-standard pinch-zoom function doesn’t work, as is true with most other touch gestures we’ve come to associate with cellphones and larger gesture-based devices. There’s nothing wrong with that though, because the mouse is a very different type of product. Zooming in and out is still based on holding down CTRL and scrolling, and I’m fine with that.

It’s also worth noting that because the Touch Mouse is made specifically for Windows 7 functions, it won’t work with Windows XP or Windows Vista. I guess that means I’ll have to upgrade my Vista desktop soon.

What I don’t particularly like is how the gestures only apply to highlighted windows. This is, of course, how Windows OS functions, though the growth in web-based applications and the importance and high-volume usage of web browsers has changed that. Many of us like being able to scroll through a page just by hovering the mouse over it and scrolling, without clicking on it. Ultimately, I believe the question of mouse hovering versus clicking is a matter of preference, though I prefer the former. Microsoft, the latter.

Still, the technology is fascinating, and I can’t wait to play around with it more. Even better, I can’t wait to see what the development community does with it once the mouse releases this May. Like Kinect, I have no doubt that we’ll see some incredible – and even more noteworthy, free – applications with a gesture-based mouse like the Touch Mouse. It should be great fun.

Speakal just threw us a cuve ball by announcing the BTS8, a phone/personal computer.  Yes, the same company that has been crafting those funny looking pig speaker docks.   If you haven’t noticed it already, that’s a 5-inch LCD screen built-in to the base, and yes it runs the Windows 7 OS.   If 5-inches is a bit too small for your liking (that’s what she said) you can connect it to an external monitor via VGA.  And the buck don’t stop at Windows 7.  The BTS8 can receive faxes, send text messages, play a variety of media files, manage contacts and view calendar info.  It also has the ability to record telephone calls, answer emails and video chat over Skype using the on board webcam.

Far as we’re concerned the jury is still out on this one, but perhaps we’ll send one of our minions at CES to check it out for a hands on.

Culver City, CA – January 6, 2011 – Speakal, a company driven by its passion for sound, intelligent technology and innovative designs, is ecstatic to announce the BTS8, an office phone system that doubles as a personal computer. The integrated Windows 7 OS enables users to manage and record your phone calls, answer emails, and even video chat with the on board webcam via Skype. The 5” LCD display can be connected to an external monitor via VGA for enhanced visibility. Additional capabilities include fax receiving, SMS text messaging, media player, contacts management, and a calendar empowering the BTS8 to be the ultimate communications and multimedia powerhouse. You can even browse the web and reach your data remotely for optimal connectivity.

“BTS8 completely streamlines business communications and computing for the modern office” said CEO David Solomon. “Users are able to optimize connectivity and empower their phone with the advanced capabilities of Windows 7 while saving up to 90% of the power regularly used with a desktop PC” added Solomon.

The expectation at any trade show is for company representatives to evangelize their products. As far as they’re concerned, they are promoting world peace, an end to world hunger, a cure for cancer, the second coming of Jesus…all wrapped in one tiny package. So it’s worth noting when one of them bluntly states to a reporter that they don’t think it’ll ever make it to market.

That’s exactly what happened with the Lenovo U1, the company’s tablet device which last year ran off Windows 7 when connected to a keyboard, acting as a standard laptop, and off a custom Linux-based UI when the screen was disconnected. This year, Lenovo showed off a nearly identical product, but with one notable change: the tablet now runs on Android. The laptop is still Windows 7.

But don’t expect it to hit the market in the US, at least not for awhile. One company representative, as I overheard a discussion with an editor at PCMag.com, said he doubts it’ll ever come to the US. “They’ll buy it in China. Nobody in the US would spend $600 for the tablet and another $500 for the laptop dock.” I’d say that depends, especially if that turns out to be the real price, but the Lenovo representative was confident the U1 wouldn’t see the light of day in the US.

As I did last year, I played around with the 10.1″ slate and it’s certainly interesting to use. The tablet feels very big, compared to both the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tablet. The Android side uses a special four-pronged layout for apps, music, video and books, which is frankly convenient for the large device but nothing special. When connecting the tablet into the keyboard and locking it into place, it switched from Android to Windows 7 in about five seconds. Removing the tablet instantly starts Android.

The cool thing is that if you’re doing something in Android that can be done on your Windows 7 machine, like browsing online, the websites you kept open will automatically transfer to the Windows 7 browser when both devices are reconnected. But it may all be for naught, since we’ll likely never see it hit retailers.

Windows 7 was built around your feedback, so you’ll see a lot of things you’ve asked for. You asked us to make everyday tasks faster and easier, to make your PC work the way you want it to, and to make it possible to do new things. And that’s exactly what Microsoft has done. See how it’s come to life.

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It wasn’t a question of if, but when Viewsonic would debut a tablet computer.  And that day was yesterday.

The company, which is primarily known for their computer monitors, released the deets on their 7-inch and 10-inch tablets.  And while they share the same form factor the hardware and even the software in each respective model is different.

The 7-inch Viewpad, affectionately known as the Viewpad 7 is an Android device with WiFi, Bluetooth and 3.5G connectivity.  The screen has a 800×480 resolution, which are complimented by two cameras (.3 megapixel on the front and a 3 megapixel on the back).  The is 512MB of built-in storage is expandable up to 32GB via the microSD card slot and the battery if good for a solid 10 hours, though were guessing it’s less in real world tests.  10 hours?  That’s on par with some laptops and can only be far less when the 3G is burning up the airwaves.  Viewsonic says that the Viewpad 7 will be available this quarter for $479.

The Viewpad 10 has a 10.1-inch screen and – get this – dual boot capabilities, which means it can run the Android OS or boot into Windows 7 Prem if you’re looking for a full fledged computing experience.  Under the hood is Intel’s Atom processor running at 1.66Ghz – we don’t know which one – 16GB of SSD storage and 1GB of RAM. Unlike its smaller brethren there is just one 1.3 megapixel camera with a microphone, so you can pretty much sum it up to webcam chatting.  This model sports WiFi only and due to its larger, higher resolution LED screen (1024×600) we can only assume that its battery life is slightly less.  The Viewpad should hit store shelves by Q1 of next year and retail for $629.

It’s worth pointing out that these may get picked up by a carrier, and while the Viewpad 10 won’t get subsidized due to it lacking a 3G connectivity, we may well see a subsidized Viewpad 7 after signing a contract.

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Microsoft announced that they’ll be releasing Windows 7 Beta this Friday as a free download. This is great news for those who are sick and tired of the clunkiness known as Vista (which sold 300 million worldwide, go figure??).

The new Windows 7 promises to be a leaner, meaner version of Vista since it was designed, as Balmer put it, with “simplicity, reliability and speed” in mind. But don’t take his words for it, try it yourself this Friday. More info here.

[Wired]