Las Vegas — The unholy unification of Windows and Mac shall be consummated with the appearance of Windows 7 on an iPad. Onlive, the company that made cloud computing cool with their game streaming service, may have just ripped a bit of thunder from Microsoft continued to push the envelope earlier this week, bringing its virtual Microsoft Windows 7 desktop plus Office apps streaming to the tablet users for free.
Running Windows 7 on an iPad via the cloud may sound like a complex, impossible dream, but it is exactly what OnLive is touting with its new OnLive Desktop App.
The OnLive Desktop app, unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show here, will initially be made available just to Apple iPad owners, but will be distributed to other platforms over time, including Android tablets, phones, plus Macs and Windows PCs – even TVs. With the app, iPads will have access to all the business applications that Windows users enjoy such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
OnLive will also bundle a cloud-based Web browser that the company feels will deliver Web pages considerably faster than the tablet’s own built-in browser, given that the OnLive servers are closely tied to the Internet’s backbone. Besides, the app is also wrapped with a full on-screen Windows keyboard and handwriting recognition. This will present the full desktop experience to the iPad with all the viewing and editing tools required to work on complex documents.
“OnLive Desktop is the first app to deliver a no-compromise, media-rich Windows desktop experience to iPad, opening up powerful new possibilities for consumers and businesses,” Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder and CEO, said. “iPad users will now be able to simply and securely view and edit cloud-hosted documents with full-featured Windows desktop applications like Microsoft Office, just as if they were using a local high-performance PC. Multi-touch gestures respond instantly and smoothly, while HD videos, animations and PC video games–never before usable on a remote desktop–play seamlessly.”
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OnLive has assured that it can seamlessly handle the graphics–and access time demands of cloud gaming, streaming some of the latest PC titles to PCs, phones, TVs, and tablets. Thus, for OnLive, rendering a Windows 7 desktop is basically child’s play. According to Joe Bentley, in charge of engineering and product for OnLive, the company has licensed Windows and a basic Office suite from Microsoft–Word, Excel, and PowerPoint–and users should basically have the experience of working on a Windows PC while in a tablet or other environment.
The service launched on Thursday, itself is free and provides 2 gigabytes of cloud storage and as-available access to a cloud-based Windows 7 PC. In simple terms, it means that free users will have to wait in queue until a server is open for them to use.
Moreover, after an initial testing phase, OnLive will offer a $9.99-per-month OnLive Desktop Pro version with 50GB of storage and access to extra software, including programs that customers can download themselves to OnLive’s servers. The company will also propose to launch an enterprise version, with which IT professionals will be able to add additional software and allocate employee access privileges.
At a price that cannot be beaten–free–it is absolutely worth giving the OnLive Desktop a try to see if it can meet your basic office productivity needs. If it does, the Pro version may be worth the monthly fee for a fully functioning desktop that is available wherever you have an Internet connection. So, starting today, U.S. iPad users will be able to download an app from the iTunes App Store to use the free service. Users can sign up for their free account now.