Thanks to this blog post from Microsoft, we now know how many editions of 'Windows 8' there will be, and yes, it will be called Windows 8 officially. How novel!
While it is refreshing to see that there isn't a buffet of versions to choose from anymore, one option in the comparison chart for the 3 editions struck me as odd. There will be no support for Windows Media Player in the WinRT (ARM processors) edition. Is there some other application that will provide this functionality out of the box? For many people, especially the 'regular consumers' that just use whatever comes pre-installed, this could be an issue. Installing a 3rd party app from the App Store makes this easy to solve, but I find it hard to imagine that there would not be native support for common media file types.
If I walked into a store and tried to play a media file on a WinRT device that didn't work, I wouldn't buy it no matter how compelling the interface was. Media consumption is a core usage scenario for these devices and a native capability supported by every other tablet on the market since it became a market.
Is there an alternative to the traditional Windows Media Player for the Windows RT edition?
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