new service that allows you to access a Windows desktop from the OnLive service.
In case you don’t know what OnLive is, its a service that lets you play games that are streamed to you instead of saved locally on your computer.
This makes it so you can play high graphics games on low graphics computers. It also means you can play your game almost anywhere (as long as you have a good broadband connection).
Now OnLive is using its service to stream the Windows Desktop to your computer. Right now they’re using Windows 7, but I’m guessing they’ll also have Windows 8 when it ships.
The features are.
- PC Microsoft® Office with 2GB cloud storage FREE
- Full-Featured Document viewing and editing
- Instant-action, media-rich Windows® cloud desktop
- Lightning-fast Web browsing with Adobe® Flash®
- For iPad and Android™ tablets. Coming soon to PC, Mac®, TVs
There is a standard service which is free where you get:
- Microsoft® Word
- Microsoft Excel®
- Microsoft PowerPoint®
- Adobe® Reader®
There is also Onlive Desktop Plus (which costs between $4.99/Mo) which adds:
- Full-featured Adobe Flash®
- Cloud file access (e.g. Dropbox)
- Web mail attachment access (e.g. Gmail™)
- Up to over 100Mbps
- Priority Access to Cloud Desktop
This is something I hoped Microsoft would eventually put into Windows itself. I wonder if this is some kind of hint that Microsoft is seriously looking into this?
Especially since Sony just bought Gaikai and I’m guessing they’re going to put it in the next Playstation.
With this service there is a network requirement of at least 1 Mbps but for best results they ask for 1.5-2 Mbps. This is good because most people at least have that.
The Onlive gaming service asks for 3 Mbps for standard graphics and 5 Mbps for HD graphics.
There is a drawback. It takes a minutes or so (depending on how big the file is) for Onlive Desktop to synchronize with the Onlive Desktop Documents folder. This may or may not be a deal breaker for people.
Also if you get disconnected with Onlive Desktop there is a chance you’ll lose your work. They say it should be ok if you reconnect to OnLive Desktop within a few minutes it should be able to resume your session and save the file.
BUT “If you can’t reconnect after 15 minutes Onlive Desktop will attempt to save your open files and you’ll find them at Files.onlive.com, or in your documents folder next time you reconnect to Onlive Desktop”.
This may be a deal breaker with people, especially companies. It would be nice if they had a sync as you type method where as you typed every character you typed was saved (or deleted).
Is this a service you would use?]]>
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two words: remote desktop