What’s inside Pre-Beta Windows 7 Build 6801

Lucky for you guys, you won’t have to wait until Tuesday’s PDC 2008 to find out what new features are going to be in Windows 7. Details about what’s going to be a part of the pre-beta build are starting to leak out. These are some of the new things we will be seeing in the pre-beta of Windows 7:

Device Stage:
A central location for users to easily interact with devices such as printers, cameras, media players, etc. Peripherals must be “Device-Stage-Enabled” to be recognized by this feature. The WinHEC site says “Device Stage is a new way for consumers to manage, explore, sync, print to, or do other common device-related tasks.”

Action Center:
A self-diagnosis feature to help users troubleshoot problems

StreamOn:
A way to control audio/video content on PCs and devices

A new animation framework:
Let’s you customize animations

New task bar and shell integration:
Something we already know about

Multi-Touch and Gesture Recognition:
Microsoft showed this feature off earlier this year

Improved Bluetooth Support

Ribbons:
As seen in the Paint and Notepad screenshots, it seems like Microsoft is going to incorporate the famous Office ribbon as a main part of the Windows 7 GUI.

Aside from these features, Microsoft says there are many more features not included with Pre-Beta that they have yet to announce at PDC 2008. ZDNet also has word that Microsoft is on-track and planning to ship the public beta of Windows 7 by mid-December. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that the public beta will contain much more than what looks like a list of improved Vista features.

Related posts:

1. Windows 7 Pre-Beta will be Build 6801
2. More changes from Windows 7 Beta to RC revealed
3. Windows 7 Build 6801 Leaked by Winbeta