Only a month ago, we reviewed OnLive Desktop, a cloud-based service that brought Office apps and delivered media-rich Windows 7 desktop experience to an iPad. However, when the application arrived, it was missing one very important element, a browser. Now with OnLive Desktop Plus, that shortcoming too has been brushed aside. OnLive Desktop Plus is an add-on for OnLive Desktop that adds browser access to the desktop experience with full Adobe Flash support and gigabit browsing speeds. It is also small in size, being around 5 megabytes.
When opened, it displays a standard Windows 7 desktop on your iPad, with fully-featured Internet Explorer integration and Adobe Reader support. Though Internet Explorer is currently the only browser available, other options like Chrome are likely to be added in the future.
Believe it or not, Adobe Flash is widely used on the Internet (for games, videos, multimedia, websites, etc.) so its unavailability on iOS devices appears as a major concern why some consumers avoid buying an iPad.
Addition of Flash will not only resolve the compatibility issue but also make Flash supporting sites load faster and run smoothly thereby providing a latency-free experience to remotely served software. Web pages will load much faster. In some tests, it was reported that pages loaded at 750 megabits per second speed. Even a 50 megabyte file downloaded in about a second or two.
If this is true, I bet users will be more than happy to pay $4.99 a month for OnLive Desktop Plus. That said, there is something left in the store for non-paying users too. This category of users i.e. ones on the OnLive Desktop Standard service will be getting Adobe Reader rather than Flash, access to fully functional PC apps like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and 2 GB of storage on OnLive’s servers.
To avail of the premium service you must have free OnLive Desktop downloaded and installed on your iPad via iTunes. When done, you can simply sign up for a OnLive Desktop account on its website to access the cloud-based software and upgrade the free standard account to a premium one.
Thus by combining OnLive Desktop’s full-featured Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader PC applications you will not only have the world’s fastest mobile browser, but the world’s most powerful productivity tools too at your fingertips. For more information on plans visit the OnLive Blog.
4 Comments
How is this better than connecting to your own win 7 or osx desktop using something like Splashtop?
well, the article focuses on getting Windows 7 functionality if not all, few on an ‘iPad’. so onlive plus appears as better option for getting them with browser integration (Internet Explorer) and Flash support.
I don’t think so but I could be wrong. If you use Splashtop say, you can do anything your remote computer can do and do it remotely. For example, I can use Splashtop on any tablet (even running WebOS) and connect to my Win 7 desktop and watch Netlfix, live TV, Hulu, browse the net with any loaded browser, use word, excel, etc, all as if I was using it natively on my tablet or smartphone. It’s like logmein on steroids and costs about $10. They have version of the client and streamer that run on WebOS, IOS, and Android. Nout sure about Linux. I guess this would be better if I didn’t have a desktop or at least one running Win 7 and I wanted it for some reason…
wow. I can’t imagine working on iPad with Windows as an OS.