There has been loads of confusion about Windows 8 for ARM-based devices as of late, but Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky has now returned with another of his exhaustive Building Windows 8 blog posts and cleared up some of the confusion. In short Windows for ARM promises to offer the same out of the box experience as the x86 edition of Windows 8. That includes the full Windows desktop (complete with File Explorer), and the same desktop Office applications including Word, Excel and PowerPoint (but only Office applications, it seems). Metro styled apps from the Windows Store will also be able to support both Windows on ARM and Windows for x86/64, and you can expect hardware-accelerated HTML5 support with Internet Explorer 10.
Sinofsky also notes that PC manufacturers are now working on devices designed specifically for WOA (or Windows on ARM), and that their “collective goal” is for them to ship at the same time as PCs designed for the x86 edition of Windows 8. While details on those devices remain light, Sinofksy did offer a new peek at one of the devices Microsoft used during the initial development of Windows for ARM when ARM-based tablets were hard to come by: an early Windows Phone.
