For those of you who are not familiar with it, a lot of
times on the iPad you can’t view certain online content because the iPad won’t
handle Flash content. I say “Won’t”
instead of “Can’t” because the iPad most certainly could handle Flash if they
wanted, but Steve Jobs never liked flash and felt that it would soon be
replaced by HTML5 and even though he’s right in the fact that Flash will be
replaced by HTML5, he was wrong in thinking it would not be needed at all. There is still a TON of flash content out
there.
So what is an iPad owner to do if he/she finds a website
they need but they can’t really use it because of the lack of Flash? Well this
problem is kind of solved with a program called “Onlive Desktop”. But to explain what Onlive desktop is, I kind
of have to explain what Onlive is.
Onlive is a company that started with a rather impressive technology
for Video Games. The simplest way to
explain it is like this, you install
their program on any computer and it allows you to log into their servers. Once you are logged in you can pick a video
game from their server and play it. Normally
there is a lot of games you can try out for free but if you want to keep any of
them you need to pay for it.
There is nothing impressive about this, there is tons of
services that let you play online right?
Well the way OnLive works when you connect to them it’s like you are
receiving a video signal and you are sending commands to their servers. They use some technology which I can’t
explain myself which allows them to send amazing looking video using very
little bandwidth. So basically the full
game is running on their server, you are
just getting the image back and sending the control commands needed to play. The video games still lag a little bit but it’s
not that noticeable. It’s truly
impressive how they can manage to send all that video and audio like that.
The main idea of the service is that with something like
this it doesn’t matter if your computer can’t handle a game, their servers sure
can and you will never need to upgrade computers to be able to play the games
because it’s always going to be the same video feed. You don’t even need a computer anymore, they
now sell a very small box and remote controller that allows you to plug it into
your TV and play that way.
Now there is OnLive Desktop!
The exact same concept but instead of games you get to
control a Windows 7 desktop. Now it’s a
very limited version, you can’t install anything. But you DO get to upload up to 2Gigs of files
(100MB Maximum file limit) and play with them on the desktop. You can play with Microsoft Word, Excel,
Powerpoint and a couple of other things.
The service is available for the iPad and Android Tablets and it’s
free.
However, and this is finally the reason for this article, if
you want to be able to use the Internet Explorer program to browse web pages,
then you’ll have to pay $5 a month. With
this option you’ll be able to use the Internet Explorer to view websites just
like you do on your own computer. And it
still streams the video and audio just as well. You can open it up and watch youtube videos if
you want or go to Hulu.com and watch those (Hulu has always blocked their
service from Tablets and I wouldn’t be surprised if they figure out a way to
block this). It really is incredible how
flawlessly the videos play. Even videos
that I’ve uploaded to the server and tried opening on the Virtual Windows 7
played fine on my tablet.
It does allow you to use a Bluetooth keyboard to type, if
you don’t have one then you have to use the Windows 7 Onscreen keyboard which
isn’t very good. On Android Tablets it’s
even more fun because Android does have support for a mouse. It just makes dealing with Windows 7
easier.
So, if you own an iPad and you need to view some page with
Flash on it or just want to play certain flash games and are ok with skipping
Starbucks once a month, then this just may be what you need. To start you’ll need to go to http://desktop.onlive.com and make an
account. They won’t request any credit
card info unless you really want to get the paid plan. I’d at least try out the free plan and play
around with word and excel.
I keep saying iPad, Android Tablets can certainly enjoy this
service as well, Android Supports flash but it can certainly slow it down. The OnLive servers are super powerful so they
wont be slowed down, and they are super fast as well, so, technically browsing
the web on one of these can be faster than on your regular connection.
Javier Torres
Anarchy Live
