Windows 8.1 officially announced - start menu becomes start tip

It's official, Microsoft has announced Windows 8.1 and posted details of the update on its blog in which it reveals that the start menu becomes the start tip. In the blog post the company states again that it believes that touch input will be as important as a mouse and keyboard and also that Windows 8 has a lot of potential ahead.

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Microsoft also states that Windows 8.1 is full of customer feedback but also includes new features and functionality that according to the company, "advance the touch experience and mobile computing's potential".

While we've already posted about many of the changes that are in Windows 8.1, the blog post reveals some functionality that wasn't known yet. Microsoft has added the option to add pictures to your lock-screen, which can be stored on both your local HDD, Skydrive or they can be directly taken with a built-in camera.

As we revealed yesterday it's also possible to use the same background in Metro and the desktop and Windows 8.1 lets you add backgrounds with motion. Microsoft also worked on the tiles in the Metro interface, so that you arrange them to your liking and added two new sizes of tiles.

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Also search in Windows 8.1 has been changed. Results will be powered by Bing which appears to mean that the search engine no longer just searches the web, but can also find results on your computer and of course on Skydrive. Talking about Skydrive, with the update also comes the ability to save files directly to Skydrive which seems to be more and more part of Microsoft's strategy.

The company has also updated many of the built-in apps and bundles the update with Internet Explorer 11 which lets you share tabs across your devices running IE 11.

An heavily discussed subject on Windows 8.1 would be the return of the start menu. Yesterday we revealed that the start menu would not be like the start menu we're used to. The official announcement now makes clear that it's no longer even called start menu but start 'tip' instead. By moving the mouse to the left bottom corner of the screen you'll see a Windows logo if you're in Metro and the Windows logo is always visible in desktop mode, in the taskbar.  There are options to change what the corners do, and options to boot into alternate screens such as the desktop and an overview of all apps instead of the Live tiles view.

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At the 26th of June a preview version of Windows 8.1 should be released and it's expected that a final version should become available in August this year.

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