Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows Division, took the stage for the first day of the Windows Developer Days conference in Japan to announce the Release Preview of Windows 8 will launch during the first week of June. The news confirms previous speculation that the Windows 8 release candidate would be called a "Release Preview." Microsoft's Building Windows 8 Twitter account confirmed the news via tweet, providing the announcement photograph seen above and the following statement:
Announce...Windows 8 Release Preview first week of June. Here's the announce from Japan's Windows 8 Dev Days #thankyou
The preview will mark the second public pre-release program for Windows 8, following the Windows 8 Consumer Preview which was released on Feb. 29. No new information has been released regarding the official release date for the final version of Windows 8, which is rumored to be sometime in October. Microsoft recently announced the Windows 8 Consumer Preview has seen over twice the usage of the Windows 7 beta over the same period of time.
Microsoft provided no additional information about the Windows 8 Release Preview beyond its release date, nor did it confirm if there would be a Release Preview of Windows RT, the ARM-based version of Windows 8. Microsoft gave out Samsung tablets to developers at the Build conference in September, but the tablets run on an Intel x86 processor. So far, Windows RT has been seen infrequently, primarily through Microsoft-led demonstrations.
Image via Microsoft
50 Comments - Add comment