Windows 8′s Look and Feel: It’s New. New, New, New, New, New!

Well, gee whiz. At the D9 conference this afternoon, Windows honcho Steven Sinofsky presided over the first good look anyone outside of Redmond has gotten at “Windows 8.” And it turns out that it has a strikingly new user interface. Maybe the most strikingly new one it’s gotten since…well, Windows 3.0 back in 1990. (Windows has added plenty of new features over the past twenty years, but the basic metaphor has barely budged at all.)

In short, Windows now has a touch-first user interface that looks a lot like Windows Phone 7, which means that it draws on ideas that originated in the iPhone without mindlessly mimicking them. The Windows 7 keyboard-and-mouse world is still in there, but it’s subsidiary. That’s Microsoft’s apparent intent, anyhow.

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What We Need from Tablets: Fewer of Them!

God knows hardware makers have been falling over each other lately in an effort to get their own tablets in front of us. The iPad showed that there was a market for these things. By some counts, over 100 different tablets showed up at CES, and this week at least 50 models were on display at Computex in Taipei. That adds up to a whole lotta tablets!

The market may turn out to be big, but it won’t be big enough for all these copycats to be successful. JP Morgan research analyst Mark Moskowitz is now saying that these folks are finally getting a clue. He claims that “build plans” — in plain English, companies’ planned manufacturing schedules — have shown a decrease in output of 10 percent.

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WebOS: Coming Eventually to a Non-HP Device Near You?

Here at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference, reporter Kevin Maney is interviewing Jon Rubinstein, former head of Palm and now the guy in charge of HP’s WebOS business. Rubinstein did all the things you’d expect he’d do–he brandished two WebOs phones (the new Veer and upcoming Pre3), showed off a TouchPad tablet, and ran a demo video. Fine. But when Maney asked him whether HP would be willing to license WebOS to other companies, he said that the company had no interest in getting into the licensing game. And then he hedged a bit: he said that it might be interested in working with “one or two special companies.”

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Twitter Announces Better Search, Photosharing

I’m at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference, not the Wall Street Journal’s D9–but I’m monitoring the news from there, too. One of this morning’s D9 guests was Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who announced a new, improved search feature and (as expected) a photosharing service in partnership with Photobucket. The latter new feature is arriving “over the next several weeks.”