The DigitalLife conference at the Javitz Center in New York officially kicked off this morning, and the first keynote of the day, dubbed, "The Beauty and Power of Windows Vista," was delivered by G. Michael Sievert, corporate vice president, Windows client marketing, Microsoft. Although Seivert's contrived disheveled look and company-line rhetoric were a bit tough to take first thing in the morning, this was my first look at Vista, and I can't say I was disappointed.

Key features of Vista:

- Search (There's a search box everywere, the search is very quick. Finishes searching before you finish typing)
- Thumbnails on bottom of desktop expand on mouseover to give a preview of the window.
- All open windows can be expanded and displayed as a 3-D collage which can then be flipped through. (This feature got the most "oohs" and "ahhs" from the crowd when displayed on the giant screens flanking the stage.)
- Automatic backups of digital files, called digital negatives, allow users to retrieve an original copy of a poorly edited digital photo even after saving.
- Protection from malware using a virtualized startup menu.

Sievert touched upon Vista's capabilities as a multimedia center in the home, pointing out the extensive integration with MTV's Urge music-download service, the Windows Home Media Center, which connects the computer up to the cable television service and the ease of burning material onto DVDs. There were a few chuckles interspersed when he couldn't get Vista to bend to his will, but overall it was an informative presentation and Vista's strongpoints were on display.

At the end of the presentation Sievert brought a colleague up on stage to demonstrate some hardware which would run Vista. He was adamant that now is a good time to buy a new computer because 100% of the new computers on the market are "Vista ready," meaning, they're running XP right now, but could be upgraded to Vista when it's finally released. Of course, no word on how much that upgrade is going to cost the consumer. — Brian Ward

Technorati tags: vista, digitallife, microsoft.