And then there's the People app, a central depository for all social media associations. The app invites you to connect to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other buckets of humanity, but once all your social media is thrown together, it's disorienting to see your disparate contacts sharing the same space. Even worse, as a Twitter client, People is precious in design but completely lacking in powerat least as far as I can tell.

Can I tweet an image? Unclear. Can I get a collapsed, more space-efficient view of the tweets of all my follows? Unclear. Do I have a way to remove Facebook updates from my "What's new" stream without hiding Facebook friends in my contacts list? It's impossible to tell.

And that's the problem with many of the preinstalled apps: They seem to lack many standard features, but you're never quite sure if they're actually dumbed-down, or if you just haven't stumbled upon the feature you're looking for.

I synced Calendar with my Google account, but Microsoft's app doesn't show individual calendars that have been shared with me. Can I add those views? If so, the operation isnt immediately obvious. Similarly, the Mail app wouldn't let me add my Gmail account. Is this because my account requires two-factor identification, and Windows RT doesn't recognize that? I don't know. The app simply reports, "That email address or password didn't work."