The sound quality is great, playback rarely stutters, and the TuneIn live tile displays information on what’s currently playing. While you could always stream your favorite radio station from your browser, TuneIn does a fantastic job of presenting a huge assortment of AM/FM radio streams and podcasts in one slick app that’s simple to navigate.
Over 14,000 radio stations exist in the United States, and TuneIn Radio will let you listen to almost all of them, plus a bunch more from across the world, for free. It’s free, it supports a wide variety of chat networks, and it lets you enable push notifications so that you can stay on top of your social life no matter what app you’re using. That may change in the future, but if you want to chat with all your friends right now across disparate networks (including AIM, Facebook, GChat, ICQ, and Jabber) Shape’s IM+ app has you covered.
Streaming movies through the app also seems smoother than streaming them through your browser, which is reason enough to launch Netflix right from your Start screen.Įveryone needs a good instant messaging client, and although the Windows 8 Messaging app is functional enough, as of publication it supports only the Windows Messenger and Facebook Chat services.
The Netflix app for Windows 8 is free to download and easy to use, with an attractive tile-based interface that’s intuitive to navigate on a touchscreen. While these apps may not satisfy all your computing needs (we just couldn’t find a great Twitter management app, for example) they should help you get the most from your Windows 8 PC. We sifted through dozens and dozens of the most popular Windows 8 apps available at launch, then tested a few dozen more and compiled this list of our favorites. Problem is, the Windows Store is still in its infancy and thus lacks a lot of free apps for well-known services such as Twitter and Facebook but even though Microsoft’s digital distribution platform can’t yet match the variety or breadth of apps available in the Apple and Google ecosystems, it still has more than enough Windows 8 apps to make your head spin. Microsoft does a pretty decent job of covering your basic computing needs with apps like Messaging, Mail, SkyDrive and Skype, but there are a few excellent third-party apps you should download post-haste. With that in mind, we’ve taken the liberty of sharing some of our favorite Windows 8 apps in order to help you get up to speed as quickly as possible so that you can take advantage of all that Windows 8 can offer.
Since you have access to a full Windows desktop you don’t need just another way to look at photos or surf the Web-you need a way to do those things better.
Unfortunately, you need to sift through a lot of crap apps in the process, especially if you’re not using a Windows 8 tablet desktop and laptop PC users don’t need to worry about the lion’s share of Windows 8 apps, because they’re usually single-purpose tools designed to replicate the functionality of a full PC on a mobile device. Windows 8 is all about the apps, so it’s important to find the best ones for your unique needs.