Working to bridge the gap between tablet and laptop/desktop computing, OnLive, a company that let gamers play popular console video games their tablet or mobile device, introduced a free app last month that allowed people to use Windows 7 and Microsoft Office on their iPad. Now OnLive has come with a follow-up that brings along with it Adobe Flash and an insanely quick Internet connection.
OnLive Desktop Plus is essentially an app that you download to your iPad. When you open it, a Windows 7 desktop appears. From there you can do mostly everything you can do on a regular Windows machine—you can create and edit Microsoft Office documents, surf the Web using Internet Explorer (that’s the only browser available within the app), and, thanks to its inclusion of Adobe Flash, watch online video from sites like Hulu.
To make all this work, OnLive does all the computing on its massive server farm and then sends an image of the desktop to your tablet.
The best part of the OnLive Desktop Plus experience, according to reviews, is the 1-gigabit-per-second Internet connection which allows for “zippy” Web surfing. David Pogue of the New York Times says the app delivers “the least annoying version of Windows you’ve ever used.”
The OnLive Desktop Plus app is available now from the Apple App Store.
