The Week in Tweets: Reacting to Windows 8

On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled Windows 8, its newest Windows progeny since Windows 7 was announced in July 2009. Windows 8 (a codename, still) is a multi-platform operating system that caters to tablets and laptops but also works on desktops.

The first unveiling took place at the All Things Digital 9 conference in Los Angeles, where PCMag editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff watched, while another demonstration was held at Computex in Taiwan, as captured by our lead laptop analyst, Cisco Cheng. Click here for the Taiwan walk-through and here for footage from California.

With tiles, the Windows 8 user interface looks a lot more like Windows Phone 7 than any PC-centric Windows OS from Microsoft. It handles touch screen Web browsing, photo manipulation and tweeting in a tablet-y fashion that will be familiar to users of Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android operating systems for tablets and smartphones.

Even though Windows 8 isn’t expected to appear in stores until the end of 2012—Microsoft’s reported one-chipmaker-per-tablet-maker rule may have something to do with that – the Twitterverse was full of strong reactions to the new build. Not everyone agreed with Microsoft’s description of Windows 8 as “possibly the most radical update since Windows 95” and “virtually unrecognizable” from Windows 7. Click on the slideshow below to see for yourself.