Gradual Panic!

I love my iPad and considering the amount of staff where I work who’ve acquired one since its launch nearly two years ago and especially this Christmas you just get the feeling that the momentum behind the ‘only’ tablet is just going to continue to snowball. But even though they are all converts to Apple’s immature platform the one thing that they all ask for is Windows and Office functionality and finally I can say… you can have it!

From the creators of OnLive the cloud-based gaming service comes the OnLive Desktop. This app brings a fully functional Windows 7 operating system to your iPad and best of all it lives in the cloud. All you need to do is to download the app (but there are limitations to this but read on) and create an OnLive Desktop account and that’s really all there is to it. Once the app is fired up you’re presented with a full Windows 7 desktop complete with the full Office 2010 suite.

The interface is pretty much what you’d expect to find on a touch screen Windows 7 laptop. Apart from Office you’re pretty much limited to the standard Windows apps such as Paint, Calculator and sticky notes but considering the revelation that you’re actually running Window on your iPad I don’t think you’ll mind.

While typing in documents etc you’ll be get with the standard Windows 7 touch keyboard which compared to the native iPad keyboard leaves a lot to be desired but like I say you’ve got Windows, you can live with it.

OnLive provides you with a limited amount of cloud store (I think it’s a couple of gig) but most certainly enough to store those documents that you’ll want to be typing.

I’m sure that there will be more developments coming in the future but as a launch app this is killer.

Now like I said earlier there are limitations to getting this app as it is only officially available in the the US at the moment but as I have found there are ways of getting round this which I am more than happy to share if you get stuck. It should be in the UK soon though.