As far as news from the electronics business go, it does not get much more exciting than this. If the latest bit of online rumor is true we are just a week away from seeing the first Windows 8-running tablet. And the first tablet with a quad-core CPU. And the first Windows device with an ARM processor. And the best bit is, those are not three different devices.

According to the industry source that went all chatty in front of the Korean newspaper, Samsung will manufacture the slate that will be given to developers at the upcoming Microsoft BUILD event next week. It will be running the software giant newest OS and will rely on NVIDIA Kal-El chipset.

Now, the unnamed Samsung slate probably will not make it to the market as the Windows 8 OS is still some way off completion and by the time Microsoft is done with the i-dotting and t-crossing, Samsung will probably have better hardware to offer. So developers attending the event will be the only lucky guys and gals to get a taste of the described awesomeness this year.

All of us Windows users shutdown our computers, even though options like Sleep and Hibernate are available. We do it because we like to have a fresh system when we start using it again. Microsoft statistics reflect this behavior, which shows a majority of people prefer to shutdown their computers. But the downside of doing this is having to wait for your computer to boot all over again and then re-open all your applications. Depending on your PC hardware, this can take several minutes.

If all this sounds familiar to you, then you will probably welcome Windows 8 with open arms. Because Microsoft has now improved the standard shutdown method that we all know and love and made it much, much faster. How fast? Well, on a powerful enough hardware, Windows 8 can boot in 8 seconds flat.

The reason for this speedy behavior is in the way Windows 8 shuts down. The new shutdown is similar to hibernation found in the current and older version of Windows, except it does save and re-open all your apps upon startup. Instead of saving everything, Windows 8 saves just the OS kernel in a file on the hard drive and then uses it to while booting up, speeding the whole processing considerably. Windows 8 also makes full use of multi-core processors to load the hibernation file. Also, since it does not save your applications, the hibernation file is also much smaller than usual.

Demo Below!

When Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 8 a week ago, the reaction from most circles was positive. The new Windows 8 user interface looks clean, attractive, and thoughtful, and in a first for a Microsoft desktop operating system, its finger friendly. But one aspect of the demonstration has the legions of Windows developers deeply concerned, and with good reason: they were told that all their experience, all their knowledge, and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Windows 8.

Key to the new Windows 8 look and feel, and instrumental to Microsoft bid to make Windows a viable tablet operating system, are new-style full-screen "immersive" applications. Windows 8 will include new APIsfor developing these applications, and here is where the problem lies. Having new APIs is not itself a concern there is simply never been anything like this on Windows before, so obviously the existing Windows APIs will not do the job but what has many troubled is the way that Microsoft has said these APIs will be used. Three minutes and forty five seconds into this video, Microsoft Vice President Julie Larson-Green, in charge of the Windows Experience, briefly describes a new immersive application a weather application and says, specifically, that the application uses "our new developer platform, which is based on HTML5 and JavaScript."

Windows developers have invested a lot of time, effort, and money into the platform. Over the years, they have learned Win32, COM, MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6, .NET, WinForms, Silverlight, WPF. All of these technologies were, at one time or another, instrumental in creating desktop applications on Windows. With the exception of Visual Basic 6, all of them are still more or less supported on Windows today, and none of them can do it all; all except Visual Basic 6 and WinForms have a role to play in modern Windows development.

Hearing that Windows 8 would use HTML5 and JavaScript for its new immersive applications was, therefore, more than a little disturbing to Windows developers. Such a switch means discarding two decades of knowledge and expertise of Windows development and countless hours spent learning Microsoft latest-and-greatest technology and perhaps just as importantly, it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools.

It does not take a genius to note that thus far the Windows 8 tech demos we have seen have had a big emphasis on touch interface and share a heck of a lot with Windows Phone Metro UI. What is more Windows 8 will almost certainly be hitting a host of tablets as well as the next generation of desktops and laptops.

Those such as ARM have already demoed a few devices with some iteration of Windows 8 but what about Microsoft stamping their own branding on a tablet. Its a trick they tried before with Zune, the Kin and a few own-brand TV, all of which yielded disappointing results, due in-part to the fact that the Microsoft name just does not have the 'cool' factor they wish it did. In fact so far the only definably successful product bearing the Microsoft name has been the Xbox 360 and even then its down-played to just the "Xbox 360", sounds to me like in their heart of hearts they know its not cool either.

Are Microsoft playing with fire and condemning a new range of tablet devices to an early grave before they have even been finalized? We are unsure, but sources at DigiTimes say that somewhere fairly high up in the supply chain, there is a tablet in the works bearing Microsoft name. The device is likely to be a Texas Instruments based ARM-powered machine, built by a Tawain based ODM. Say for the fact you will probably get a capacitive high-res touch screen and some WiFi, there is basically nothing else to really say here, so we will have to wait and see how the public receive a Microsoft tab, expected sometime in 2012.

Mac and Apple fans are known to take jabs at each other at every opportunity they find. Is mostly good, clean fun although sometimes it can get ugly, as can be seen from the comments section on technology websites, including ours.

Today we came across an event that falls under the "Good, clean, fun" category, where the Windows logo was found plastered on an upcoming Apple Store. The black structure you see in the picture above is actually the upcoming Apple Store in Hamburg, Germany. New Apple stores are usually covered in those black structures before they are unveiled to the public. Some Windows fans, however, decided to use this opportunity to plaster a huge Windows logo on the side. The logo has been painted over in black ever since but it managed to serve its purpose.

Video Below!