Windows 10 news recap: 200M installs, Redstone bits, and more

Welcome back to our weekly Windows 10 news recap, in which we recap the top news stories regarding Windows 10 for the week. Let’s dive straight in.

Windows 10 activations exceeds 200 million installs, includes Xbox One consoles

This week, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 10 is now installed on over 200 million devices across the globe, making it one of the fastest growing operating systems ever released by the company.

More than 40% of those devices became active since Black Friday on November 29th, raising US retail PC share for Windows 10 by 16 points to 62%, and the number of sales of Windows 10 machines over the holiday season has also been impressive, with some 87% of PCs sold coming installed with Windows 10, versus only 58% before the holidays.

Windows 10 is now used by almost 33% of Steam gamers

In light of Microsoft announcing 200 million Windows 10 installs, Steam updated their stats to reveal Windows 10 was now in use on over 33% of Steam users PC’s, a pretty impressive number considering Windows 10 is less than a year old.

Last month, just under 30% (specifically, 29%) of Steam users were running Windows 10. In December 2015, that number jumped roughly three percentage points to 32.46%. Windows 7’s lead is narrowing, down to 42.58% although still firmly in the #1 spot.

Microsoft working to get next Windows 10 Redstone preview build out “pretty quickly”

Also this week, Gabe Aul mentioned that his team was working hard on getting the next Redstone build out pretty quickly, and that once the next preview build was release, the company would begin speeding up build drops.

In the past, Microsoft referencing any time frame for Insider drops would mean anything from a few weeks to a couple months, but the insinuation here as that Insiders should expect it soon, probably within the next week or so at the latest.

Here’s what Microsoft plans to do with display scaling on Windows 10 Redstone

This week also saw Microsoft detail advances that had been made with display scaling in Windows 10, including features such as using different DPIs across different screens at one time. Microsoft says:

Scaling is a complex problem for the open Windows ecosystem, which has to support devices ranging in size from roughly 4” to 84,” with densities ranging from 50DPI to 500DPI. In Windows 10 we took steps to consolidate and simplify our developer story for scaling and to improve the end-user visual experience. Stay tuned for future release!”

Our top 5 most interesting products at CES 2016

To finish of this weeks news recap, we thought it would be fitting to check out our top 5 most interesting products announced at CES this week. In our list, we picked:

• Samsung TabPro S
• Alcatel OneTouch Pixi 3
• Acer Liquid Jade Primo
• Lenovo Yoga S900
• Voice on Call app for Microsoft Band 2

You can check out the link above for more details on each product we listed. In the meantime though, that’s all for this weeks Windows 10 news recap. Let us know what your favorite story was below!