Cheree Heppe here:
This sounds as if it may solve a number of problems. See article below.
N Y Times Tech news for the week of Thursday 2/23/2012
Windows on the iPad, and Speedy
By [7]DAVID POGUE
You're probably paying something like $60 a month for high-speed
Internet. I'm paying $5 a month, and my connection is 1,000 times
faster.
Your [8]iPad can't play Flash videos on the Web. Mine can.
Your copy of Windows needs constant updating and patching and
protection against viruses and spyware. Mine is always clean and always
up-to-date.
No, I'm not some kind of smug techno-elitist; you can have all of that,
too. All you have to do is sign up for a radical iPad service called
OnLive Desktop Plus.
It's a tiny app -- about 5 megabytes. When you open it, you see a
standard Windows 7 desktop, right there on your iPad. The full, latest
versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader
are set up and ready to use -- no installation, no serial numbers, no
pop-up balloons nagging you to update this or that. It may be the least
annoying version of Windows you've ever used.
That's pretty impressive -- but not as impressive as what's going on
behind the scenes. The PC that's driving your iPad Windows experience
is, in fact, a "farm" of computers at one of three data centers
thousands of miles away. Every time you tap the screen, scroll a list
or type on the on-screen keyboard, you're sending signals to those
distant computers. The screen image is blasted back to your iPad with
astonishingly little lag.
There's an insane amount of technology behind this stunt -- 10 years in
the making, according to the company's founder. (He's a veteran of
Apple's original QuickTime team and Microsoft's WebTV and Xbox teams.)
OnLive Desktop builds on the company's original business, a service
that lets gamers play high-horsepower video games on Macs or
low-powered Windows computers like netbooks.
The free version of the OnLive Desktop service arrived in January. It
gives you Word, Excel and PowerPoint, a few basic Windows apps (like
Paint, Media Player, Notepad and Calculator), and 2 gigabytes of
storage.
Plenty of apps give you stripped-down versions of Office on the iPad.
But OnLive Desktop gives you the complete Windows Office suite. In
Word, you can do fancy stuff like tracking changes and high-end
typography. In PowerPoint, you can make slide shows that the iPad
projects with all of the cross fades, zooms and animations intact.
Thanks to Microsoft's own Touch Pack add-on, all of this works with
touch-screen gestures. You can pinch and spread two fingers to zoom in
and out of your Office documents. You can use Windows' impressive
handwriting recognition to enter text (although a Bluetooth keyboard
works better). You can flick to scroll through a list.
Instead of clicking the mouse on things, you can simply tap, although a
stylus works better than a fingertip; many of the Windows controls are
too tiny for a finger to tap precisely. (On a real Windows PC, you
could open the Control Panel to enlarge the controls for touch use --
but OnLive's simulated PC is lacking the Control Panel, which is one of
its few downsides.)
OnLive Desktop is seamless and fairly amazing. And fast; on what other
PC does Word open in one second?
But the only way to get files onto and off OnLive Desktop is using a
Documents folder on the desktop. To access it, you have to visit
OnLive's Web site on your actual PC.
The news today is the new service, called OnLive Desktop Plus. It's not
free -- it costs $5 a month -- but it adds Adobe Reader, Internet
Explorer and a 1-gigabit-a-second Internet connection.
That's not a typo. And "1-gigabit Internet" means the fastest
connection you've ever used in your life -- on your iPad. It means
speeds 500 or 1,000 times as fast as what you probably get at home. It
means downloading a 20-megabyte file before your finger lifts from the
glass.
You get the same speed in both directions. You can upload a 30-megabyte
file in one second.
And remember, you're using a state-of-the-art Windows computer, so you
can play any kind of video you might encounter online. OnLive Desktop
Plus turns the iPad from a tablet that can't play Flash videos at all
-- into the smoothest Flash player you've ever used. And yes, that
includes watching free TV at Hulu.com, which you can't otherwise do on
the iPad.
The Plus version's Internet connection makes a world of difference. Now
you can use DropBox to get files onto and off your iPad from other
gadgets, like Macs and PCs. (That, the company says, is why the Plus
service still offers only 2 gigabytes of storage for your files; it
figures you've now got the whole Internet as your storage bin.) You can
get to your Gmail, Yahoo mail, corporate Exchange mail and other online
accounts -- with ridiculously quick response.
Now, you might be wondering: What good is a 1-gigabit connection on
OnLive's end, if the far slower connection on my end is the bottleneck?
The secret is that OnLive isn't sending you all of the data from your
Web browsing session. It's sending you only a video stream the size of
your iPad screen. For example, if you're playing a hi-def video, OnLive
pares down the data to just what your iPad can show. If you scroll a
video off the screen, OnLive doesn't bother sending you its data. And
so on.
OnLive (free) and OnLive Plus ($5 a month) are both brilliantly
executed steps forward into the long-promised world of "thin client"
computing, in which we can use cheap, low-powered computers to run
programs that live online. But the company's next plans are even more
exciting.
For example, the company intends to develop a third service, called
OnLive Pro ($10 a month), that will let you run any Windows programs
you want. Photoshop, Firefox, Autodesk, games -- whatever.
The company still isn't sure how that will work; somehow, you'll have
to prove that you actually own the software you're running on its
servers. But what a day that will be, when you can run any Windows
program on earth on your iPad.
And not just on your iPad. The company is also working on bringing
OnLive to Android tablets, iPhones and [9]iPod Touches, Macs and PCs,
and even to TV sets. (That last trick would require a small set-top
box.)
Suddenly Mac fans will have the full world of Windows and all of its
programs -- without the speed and memory penalties of programs like
Parallels and VMWare. And nobody will have to worry about viruses,
spyware or software updates; OnLive's virtual PCs are always pristine.
This is all so crazy cool, it seems almost ungrateful to point out the
flaws -- but here goes.
The delay between finger touch and on-screen response is usually tiny.
But when you paint or use the handwriting recognition, the lag is
painful.
Since you're actually viewing a video stream, you sometimes see typical
video stream glitches like low-resolution text blocks that quickly
clear up.
OnLive says that its service works great over 4G cellular connections
(like the one provided by an LTE MiFi) -- but 3G connections and feeble
hotel Wi-Fi hot spots are too slow to be satisfying. OnLive wants at
least a 2-megabits-a-second connection on your end.
Finally, you have to sign into OnLive every time you want to use it,
even if you've just flicked away to another iPad app. (OnLive says
it'll fix that.)
Even so, if ever there were a poster child for the potential of cloud
computing, OnLive is it. This is jaw-dropping, extremely polished
technology. It opens up a universe of software and horsepower that live
far beyond the iPad's wildest dreams -- with no more effort on your
part than a few taps on glass.
E-mail: po...@nytimes.com
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