[Eee Pad Transformer Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] maxawesome:
Android is free as in free speech, not as in free beer. OEMs most definitely pay a licensing fee to Google if they want to distribute it with proprietary Google apps (Gmail, Market, Maps, etc).

The Windows 8 license fee will likely be higher, but it is also a more powerful OS. Two different versions will be released: one for x86 architecture (both 32-bit and 64-bit) and one for ARM.

As in previous versions of Windows, the x86 version will of course ship with standard driver support for a very wide and diverse set of devices.

More than likely, the ARM version will come pre-installed on devices with a recovery disk. This version will likely contain a very basic set of common drivers for ARM-based devices that OEMs can then modify to include specific proprietary drivers for their custom hardware builds.

Will we ever see Win8 on the TF1? There was a time when I would say it was doubtful, but really it only takes the dev community getting its hands on an RUU style installer for a device with the same or very similar hardware, and creating a custom bootloader similar to MAGLDR from the HD2 forums.

Even then, you'd likely be missing several important drivers. OEMs like to change WiFi and Bluetooth hardware with every new device it seems.

But, wouldn't it be nice to discover that once the base load is done, one could then update through Windows Update to get any missing drivers?

I think if Microsoft really wants to dominate the tablet market, it needs to have a story to support the "will it run on the tablet I already have" scenario, and I'm hoping they do.

---------- Post added at 04:33 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:31 AM ----------

The amount of "derp" in your post is alarming.

Do you have any stats to back up your "halve your battery" claim? Do you know anything about the internal efforts at Microsoft to produce an ARM-compatible version of Office at launch of Win8? Do you have any real stats as to how many developers are planning to recompile their existing apps to target ARM instead of x86 architecture? Do you know how many apps are already based on HTML5 that will work natively when ported over?

No. You know none of these things.

Your "Microsoft's best years" nonsense is exactly what people said about Apple before Jobs rejoined the company in 99, and their stock subsequently went from single digit to triple digit value in under 10 years.

---------- Post added at 04:41 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:33 AM ----------

I'm pretty sure you pulled that out of your ass. :D

---------- Post added at 04:47 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:41 AM ----------

A 1Ghz single-core Pentium 3 is in no way comparable to a 1Ghz AMD APU, nor is it comparable to a Tegra chip, nor an Atom CPU. They are all different architectures, and so it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Frequency, cache, memory controller, GPU, bus, core switching, etc. --> these are just some of the many facets that set CPUs apart.

That's why an i3 ULV 1.33Ghz dual-core will run circles around an Atom 1.66Ghz dual core, despite being clocked lower, and that's only considering that both are x86 CPUs.

---------- Post added at 04:50 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:47 AM ----------

And hopefully they will require an x86 (32/64-bit) and ARM version of software before it will be certified and published in the Windows App Store.