So today Microsoft rolled out some more features that will be coming to Windows 8.1, and if you read my previous posts, you’d see that I’ve already declared Windows 8.1 to be “The World’s Most Advanced Operating System” and yes, that is a play on the headline from Apples web site on it’s iOS page.
We’ve all seen the Samsung commercials where the Galaxy user taps his phone against another Galaxy touting the device’s ability to share a picture or a playlist just by tapping the phones together. Of course this method is fairly useless and most Galaxy users will admit that they almost never use this feature if they’ve ever used it at all.
This technology is called Near Field Communication or NFC and Microsoft has found a business use for it that’s actually practical. With the new Windows 8.1 update, you will be able to tap your Windows device against an NFC printer and print whatever you need to. No special printer will be necessary. Just attach an NFC tag to the printer you already have. This will be especially useful if you have a network of printers.
So let’s take a moment to compare Windows 8.1 to its competition. It will now support “Active Desktop” which is something Android does but Mac OS and iOS does not. It will have NFC support, which isn’t natively supported in iOS and is only supported in some Android devices. IE11 promises to support 3-D images and be the “first touch based web browser” making it a more advanced browser than Safari. Chrome still has voice search which is a feature that Bing has yet to roll out but let’s not forget that there is more to come from Microsoft regarding Windows 8.1.
For the Love of Tech 