Windows 10X shown running on a Surface Pro 7 – and it looks pretty cool
Yet another device has been spotted running the leaked near-final build of 10X
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Windows 10Xis now running on another device, with the recently leaked build of the lightweight OS having been shown off on aSurface Pro7.
Well-knownMicrosoftleaker Zac Bowden already provided us with avideo of the purportedly near-final buildof Windows 10X in action, but there’s now footage of it running on the Surface Pro 7 – showing how the operating system works with a touchscreen.
This clip was made by a developer going under the name of ‘ADeltaX’ who did the grunt work of getting the drivers to function properly with Windows 10X and enabling support for elements such as the camera.
The OS appears to run pretty slickly, albeit with a touch of lag here and there – but obviously bear in mind that this is not the final build of Windows 10X, and of course it has been unofficially crow-barred onto the Pro 7.
The video shows the main ways that the desktop will function under a touch-based control scheme, with the user able to easily pull up either the Start menu (which is now a launcher-style affair that will be very familiar to Chromebook users) or the new Action Center (which is now split into Quick Settings and Notifications panels, as we’ve seen before).
Stylus switching
At one point, the developer also uses a stylus and flicks swiftly and seamlessly between running apps. Remember that Windows 10X will only let you run full-screen apps, not windowed ones, and you’ll only be able to snap two apps side-by-side in terms of multitasking. (To begin with,only PWA and web apps will be supported, too.)
This also represents an interesting look at how Windows 10X can be run on existing devices, remembering that Microsoft only intends to make it available on new PCs as a preinstalled OS. The tricky bit, of course, is getting all the drivers to work, otherwise users will be missing important bits and pieces of functionality.
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As you might have seen, we recently reported on Windows 10X running on anM1-powered (ARM) MacBook, and a Lumia smartphoneno less, as well as a Surface Go. By all accounts, Microsoft’s OS ran quite nicely on the MacBook, and given all the fudging required to make these projects work, that’s promising news in terms of how 10X will function on devices it’s actually made for.
Incidentally, the model of Surface Pro 7 used here was the Core i5 with 16GB of RAM.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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