Windows 8 handwriting, desktop and touch
Hands on: Windows 8 review
In Depth: Up close with the developer preview of Microsoft's new OS
On-screen keyboard and handwriting recognition
Windows 8's multi-touch on-screen keyboard is a big improvement over what you get in Windows 7.
Fuzzy hit targeting (which we explain in the Windows desktop and touch section below) makes it far more accurate.
It also has excellent auto correct for common mistakes. Sometimes it suggests a change but doesn't make it automatically - if you type a real word but you could have meant to type something slightly different.
And to make it faster, you can hit the Insert key rather than having to move your finger to select from the menu. You'll also see the familiar red squiggly underline for spellings Windows doesn't recognise and can't fix.
For faster typing when you're holding a tablet in both hands, you can split the keyboard in half and type with your thumbs. Although the keys look far too small, this is also remarkably accurate.
Or you can use handwriting. The writing area is far less fiddly than in Windows 7, with plenty of space over two lines. Your handwriting is converted straight into text, but select the text if it's wrong and you can correct or rewrite it.
Windows 8 apps can also use ink that keeps your writing but recognises the text, just as in Windows 7 - there's a simple Metro ink application as well as the Windows Journal. Unless your handwriting is really bad, recognition is generally accurate.
Windows 8 desktop and touch
Even on the highest touch resolution Windows 7 screens (and few Windows 7 tablets have high touch resolution screens), touching the tiny icons in toolbars can be hard. Even closing a window by touch is a hit and miss affair.
Although the Windows 8 desktop looks substantially the same and tiny buttons for the notification area still look tiny, Microsoft has done a hugely impressive job at making it easy to accurately select things on screen with touch.
Tap the notification button and you don't open the on-screen keyboard or Action Center instead, even though they're mere pixels away.
Swipe to select a range of files in Explorer by dragging your finger over them and they select neatly, with checkboxes next to them to make it easy to remove anything you don't want.
The Explorer ribbon buttons and options aren't particularly big buttons, but we could select the ones we wanted every single time, and it was easy to select entries in Task Manager.
The secret is something called 'fuzzy hit targeting' which works the same way the touchscreen keyboard does on Windows Phone 7, detecting where it's most likely that you meant your finger to go.
The software developer has to interpret that to pick the right button. Microsoft has done an excellent job of that for standard Windows controls such as minimising, maximising and closing buttons or expanding a folder tree in a file dialog (another tiny triangular button we could touch accurately every time), as well as for the ribbon and other Windows components.
The test will be how well that works on a wide range of third-party applications where it's up to the developer to deal with the information from Windows 8 touch, so we expect Windows 8 tablets to come with pens.
The converse of touching what you want is not touching what you don't want. In particular, you don't want to worry about resting your hand on screen while you're writing with a pen, which for most of us is the only way to write neatly (and you need to be reasonably neat for handwriting recognition to work).
Windows is the only tablet operating system that handles palm rejection, blocking the brush of your hand on screen as you write.
We haven't seen this in operation on an ARM tablet yet, but Microsoft says the handwriting recognition will work there are well.
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