Windows 8 release preview imminent

Microsoft is about to release a new Release Preview of Windows 8, according to a pair of blog posts.

One of the posts, reported widely, suggested May 31st would be the big day. That post quickly vanished from the web.

But a post announcing new features in Microsoft's SkyDrive says we can expect the preview in “the first week of June.”

The post also says:

SkyDrive for Windows desktop will power a cool new feature … Right from the Photos app in Windows 8, you can fetch photos stored on your other PCs that have SkyDrive installed – no matter where you are or how many terabytes of photos you have stored on the PC you are accessing. We’ll have more to say about this shortly, so stay tuned.

We will indeed stay tuned, especially in light of other reports a Chinese edition of the preview has made it into the wild.

The SkyDrive post, for what it is worth, also says SkyDrive's Windows and MacOS apps have received upgrades, as has the Windows Phone client. Paid users can now get 100GB of storage, spread across ten million files. The previous file count limit was a mere 150,000.

Another line in the blog post says “In just a few weeks, more people were using SkyDrive apps than have used Mesh.” Here in The Reg's antipodean eyrie it took us a moment to remember just what “Mesh” means in a Microsoft context. Once our synapses did their thing we were reminded that Mesh debuted back in 2008 when it offered a set of services that are not vastly different to what's on offer from SkyDrive.

Increased interest in, and hype around, cloud storage are probably behind the greater enthusiasm this time around. The promised Windows 8 integration could take things to another level. ®