Get Windows Desktop On Your Android And iOS Tablets
Onlive, a service to play games over the cloud, now brings the Windows platform on your Android or iOS tablets. If you are on a vacation or just out of the office and need to send your boss a quick sales report for the last quarter, what would you do? True, there are lots of Android and iOS apps you can do that. However, you are going to miss the nice multi-functional Windows desktop at your office. Well no more. Here is a quick review of what and what not you can do with the new Onlive Desktop for tablets.
MS Office And Adobe Reader:
Microsoft Office is by far the best document creating/editing suite available in the market. Google Docs, OpenOffice serves the purpose but aren’t as user-friendly or power-packed tool compared to the Microsoft offering. Now since you can’t have the full MS Office on your Android or iOS tabs adds limitations to your office computing needs on the go. The free plan offered by Onlive includes and lets you use the three most used tools from the MS Office package, MS Word, MS Excel and MS Powerpoint. With all those power you can literally get a working environment anywhere. The other benefit comes with Adobe Reader, which is a popular tool for reading PDFs.
Cloud Storage:
The importance and demand for cloud storage is already clear by now. With major players like Dropbox, Sugarsync, MiMedia etc and Google joining in hopefully soon, the cloud storage market is on a high. The free Onlive Desktop account addresses the issue and offers a similar 2GB secure online storage. That means you can literally carry your work documents and put them to use (or review them) at your leisure.
Web 2.0 And Flash:
This two includes a major part of your office work. Gmail and Dropbox are two most useful web tools any professional needs to have access to at any point of time. On the other hand Flash which is mostly useful for watching videos over the web is somewhat needed too. The premium plan ($4.99/month) includes these (Gmail, Dropbox and Gigabit-accelerated² full Flash browser) for an even better office environment at your mercy.
Bandwidth Limitations:
If you are looking for a flaw that needs to be corrected, it’s the bandwidth the app demands. The app is kinda data hogging and collapses if you do not have a real fast connection. This is one thing the developers needs to resolve very soon if it wants to make the service indispensable for professionals.
Apart from the free and Onlive Desktop Plus plans there are certain other pricing plans about to be released which will be targeted towards enterprises. The Online Desktop Pro is the best plan if your profession needs you to travel a lot. The plan offers to have all the above mentioned capabilities along with 50GB cloud storage and other PC applications of your choice. The plan is expected to cost you around $9.99/month, good enough compared to the Dropbox Pro which offers the equal amount of storage for the same price. The files you create or carry on your Onlive Desktop can easily be accessed from any device (capable of connecting to the web) by logging into your Onlive account here. The app is currently available for tablets only and variants for smartphones, Mac and TVs are soon to come.
All said, this certainly is a great idea to start considering the humongous amont of Windows users around the globe. Keeping aside the bandwidth issues, OnLive Desktop is a great choice for professionals who choose to be working from anywhere.