There certainly seems to be quite a wide variety of opinions when it comes to changes to the UI in Windows 8, namely the introduction of the Windows Phone-esque “Metro.” In Windows 8, you will use the Metro interface and apps, regardless of whether you own a tablet, desktop or laptop. Don’t worry though, the desktop still exists and is fully compatible with all older applications, provided your tablet or PC has an x86 processor.

When it comes to new mobile platforms, the key is to try and lure in as many big name app makers into developing for your OS. The more apps, the more reasons that a consumer has to purchase a device running a specific operating system, such as Windows 8. Up until now though, a developer had pretty much two choices:

1) Use a PC for developing Metro apps and hope everything looks great on the tablet, too.
OR
2) Invest in an x86 tablet that can run Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

This probably isn’t a big deal for some of the larger development studios, but indie developers will be happy to hear that a third option exists now. Splashtop has crafted its Win8 Metro Testbed, which is essentially software that allows developers to test out their Windows 8 Metro apps right from their iPads.

This move makes a lot of sense for developers that can’t afford, or simply refuse, to make a $500-$1000 investment on an x86 tablet for running Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and yet to still want to test options like multi-touch.

The app is on the official Apple market right now for a special introductory price of $25. Get it now if you want to test out your Metro apps on your iPad, because it will soon revert to $50. Overall, an interesting idea and at least somewhat surprising that the folks at Apple allowed this to even appear on their platform.

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This means that ARM tablets (and maybe netbooks based on ARM chips) will only sport a touch Metro user interface, and no fallback to full Windows “regular” desktop mode with its traditional keyboard and mouse support.

The significance of such a decision is hard to underestimate.  Basically, it could means that legacy software developed for x86 architectures is suffering insurmountable difficulties in staying practical, or just plain working when recompiled for ARM architectures.

Even if Windows 8 core components and critical desktop software is completely re-written from scratch, it doesn’t guarantee that it will work  flawlessly on ARM tablets.

First of all, in the ARM land there’s no single spec set of hardware to point at as a target for Microsoft developers. For Google’s Android, this disease is called “fragmentation”, losing control of the OS to OEMs is definitely not the Microsoft philosophy.

Second, whatever the single particular implementation will be chosen from (obviously) multicore Cortex A9 or Cortex A15-based ARMs, out of both current and future  processors and SoCs, it’s clear that as of today they are all hardly powerful enough to be used and compete even with a low-end Wintel netbooks.

Just for the sake of illustration of difficulties in porting Windows 8 to ARM it should be noted that only two or three latest Cortex A15 prototypes mention support for DirectX technology.

Poor memory bandwidth could be another hurdle on the path of running Windows 8 on ARM tablet. In any case, a traditional, Windows7-looking legacy windowing system is just not that practical for a touch device, especially since its not optimized for touch-input anyway.

So, with the “desktop” gone, long live the “touchtop”!

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