I'll be definitely looking at a Win8 as an option in the future. With that said there are some major caveats I think MS needs to be aware of. I'm an old Pocket PC user, I was the guy who spent hours trying to find a way to integrate a Sprint CF 1xrt card into a Pocket PC and make it a phone way back in the beginning. There is a small subset of us guys who truly enjoyed those heady days when we actually had a windows like OS in the palm of our hands.
But MS made a LOT of mistakes with Pocket PC/Windows Mobile and subsequently their Tablet market, which is why none of those platforms has enjoyed even a small fraction of success that the iphone/ipad has. Developers and users for years and years would rail to MS about the path they were heading in, if MS just listened the market would be a different story now.
The things I see making or breaking Win8 in the mobile space include many of the mistakes MS made back then. First is the UI, back in the pocket PC days they stuffed a desktop UI into a mobile space, this was extremely cool for us nerds who sat hunched over with stylus and explored it, but it wasn't a good thing for the general population who wanted to get things done while eating a burger and driving their car thru rush hour traffic. Apple solved this issue with iOS, although IMO they went too far into the simple UI territory, still iOS works wonderfully for the non technically oriented consumer. This is one of the things MS needs to get right, you can't have a mobile OS and then have tiny taskbar menus or tiny controls pop up, you can't have something that you can't handle one handed or that breaks that mobile flow. I think they are taking great strides towards this in using Win8 dev build, but I'm afraid of the compromise on the other end. Already in desktop mode I see mobile elements in Win8 that are slowing down my productivity. There are methods to switch some of that off and get the normal desktop, start menu, etc etc on there though. I look at some of these growing pains like launchpad on LiOn, kind of useless but just a first step in the path to OS unification.
Of course the elephant in the room is hardware, MS NEEDS to get this right. All day battery life, instant on, no crashes, no fans, thin hardware, viewable screen. I think they are in the right direction, look at the ipad vs. win8 video and tell me that win8 tablet isn't pretty awesome in size. Now it's just a prototype and I would expect hardware manufacturers to come out with something nicer, more power efficient, not using a fan, etc. But here MS has to differentiate itself from a laptop, something Apple has done very well. If I need a web browser or to bring family pics along I'll grab the ipad, if I need to write a long report or do research I'll bring my laptop. Win8 may very well be the first OS which straddles this line, giving me the option to bring my Win8 tablet for both those purposes and truly letting me say goodbye to my laptop. But I'm seeing talk about ARM processors and how they might be different in the software they run, this would be a HUGE mistake on MS part branching the market like that. It would create confusion as to which tablet runs what software, although in typical fashion I'm sure MS would have a naming convention such as Win8 professional and Win8 home or some such idiocy. Win8 needs to be Win8, it needs to run all the same software regardless of hardware platform.
I'm very excited about Win8 and if Microsoft can successfully tackle both the UI and the hardware I'm all in, otherwise I'll be content with my ipad and win8 laptop.
