I’ve only had a short time to play with Windows 8, but it’s already apparent there are plenty of excellent new features in the next-gen operating system. There are several not so hot features, too, but I’ll deal with those in a separate blog post. In the meantime, here’s my pick of what I’ve seen so far.

1. Interactive tiles

The interactive tiles make the Windows 8 Start Screen infinitely more useful than the iPad’s home screen, which is little more than an app directory. You don’t need to fire up the Calendar to discover when your next appointment is because it’s displayed on the Start Screen; live prices of your chosen stocks are delivered in real-time; and there’s no need to delve into the Weather app because the enlarged icon displayed the forecast for the next three days in your current location. Once app developers start to get to grips with interactive tiles,  this could become a killer feature of the new OS.

2. The onscreen keyboard

It doesn’t have the wow factor of Android’s Swype, but the Windows 8 onscreen keyboard does have some impressive features. When auto-suggest items appear as you type, for example, an Insert button appears to the right of the space bar, meaning you don’t have to remove your hands from the keyboard to take advantage of the suggestion and cancel out any potential timesaving. The onscreen keyboard also has a split configuration for use on larger tablets, so you can simply use your thumbs to type. It works surprisingly well.

3. Customisable Start Screen

The Windows 8 Start Screen is much easier to customise than any tablet or desktop operating system I’ve ever come across. Interactive tiles can be made bigger or smaller by simply dragging down on their icon; tiles can be easily dragged and dropped into a new position in the stream – with no iOS style pause as you schlep from one screen to the next, because there is only one Start screen. And although I’m having a little difficulty doing so on my developer build tablet, groups of tiles can (theoretically) be pulled together into customisable groups that are easy to rearrange en mass.

4. Task Manager

As Windows chief Steven Sinofsky admitted, the Task Manager gets a makeover about as often as Princess Anne, so it’s nice to see some real innovation in this core component of the Control Panel. The Task Manager is now displayed as a heatmap, making it easy to identify resource-gobbling applications or processes. There’s also an incredibly useful App History Tab, which exposes the apps that have been downloading the most data over your wireless network – which could potentially be a huge cash saver if you’re paying for data by the MB on a 3G connection. The Task Manager is also the new place to turf out apps that have sneakily wormed their way into your boot routine.

5. Visual Studio/Expression Blend

OK, not strictly a feature of the operating system itself, but the early developer builds of Windows 8 come with two priceless tools for app developers: Visual Studio 11 Express and Microsoft Expression Blend 5. I’m no app developer, but having watched the demonstrations on how to create a HTML/JavaScript app with Visual Studio’s preset templates and syntax suggestion/correction, I’m tempted to give it a go. Indeed, Microsoft recruited 20 interns to create several of the apps that are pre-installed on the Windows 8 Developer Build.

Express Studio, meanwhile, provides a WYSIWYG environment for designing your app interface, making it deliciously simple to add even relatively sophisticated tools such as zoom sliders to applications, and reformat apps for different orientations and resolutions. Coding an app for iOS looks frankly terrifying for an enthusiastic amateur like me; coding an app for Windows 8 looks like an achievable weekend project.

6. Built-in virtualisation

For the first time Windows is shipping with Microsoft’s hypervisor, Hyper-V, which could be a terrific boon for power users. It allows users to run multiple operating system instances from the one PC.  The licensing terms aren’t yet clear, but developers will definitely benefit from the option of quickly booting into different versions of Windows. And as Jon Honeyball pointed out in a conversation we held earlier today, it could also be a big plus for power users who don’t like the way Windows 8 handles the conventional Windows Desktop – just ignore it, and boot up a virtualised version of Windows 7.

7. Proper multitasking

Other tablet operating system vendors may boast of multitasking but they don’t really mean it: you can still largely only do one thing at a time. Windows 8, on the other hand, offers proper multitasking. An email client running down one side of the screen with a browser on the other is a distinct possibility with the way Windows 8 allows you to snap apps to both sides of the screen. You can even have a video window running while you’re playing a game – while admittedly thrashing the processor to within an inch of a nervous breakdown.

8. Instant search

The pop-up Start button may have gone, but searching for files or apps by keyword is now even easier. You can just start typing an app’s name right on the Start Screen and a search menu zooms to the fore in a flash with a list of matching applications, settings or files. This is particularly useful for accessing things such as the Command Line or Device Manager, which are otherwise tucked away. It’s also possible to search within applications:  so if I type “Nicole” and click on the Socialite application, the Facebook profile of our lovely news editor pops into view.

9. Apps that talk to one another

Microsoft has been particularly clever with the APIs it’s offering to app developers, allowing them to share data with one another. Say, for example, you come across a terrific photo while browsing Flickr in Internet Explorer 10 – you can hit the Share button, and then send a link to that photo using any application that has adopted Microsoft’s Sharing “Contract” API. A social networking app, for example, as shown in the photo below.

10. Cloud synchronisation

Although I’ve only seen this demonstrated, and haven’t yet had access to two Windows 8 machines to try this for myself, the synchronisation of your apps, settings and Start Screen set-up across multiple devices sounds like it could take the pain out of migrating to a new PC. Admittedly, this app syncrhonisation only works with the new-look Metro Apps – not full-blown desktop software – but it’s a decent headstart on starting from scratch with a fresh installation.

To be fair, little tweaks do arrive every now and then. The SMS feature which has been gathering attention today, for example, but they’re often not enabled by default. Google keeps that BETA tag on the logo, though, so there’s really no reason for it to be squeamish about making updates.

If you’ve never tried, then you should dabble with some of these experimental features. Pop to your settings page from within GMail, then the Labs tab. Here you’ll find loads of interesting tweaks that you can turn on.

For example, as of this morning, I’ve seen profile pictures next to messages in the chat window. Brilliant. That’s enough to keep me happy for a day or two.

Quick Links, that’s another – bring up any window; a search for unread email (enter “is:unread” in the search box) or all emails from a colleague (enter “from:Bayon” in the search box) and then click on Add Quick Link, and you get a handy link for that search in the future. There’s a feature that should immediately be rolled-out to everyone. It’s saving me literally milliseconds a day.

There’s even one that will prompt you to add an attachment if you mention doing so in an email but forget. No more will you have to send embarrassing follow-up emails when you forget to drop that file in a message.

Don’t blame me if one of these untested features deletes all your email, though. It is Beta, after all.