OnLive Desktop hits App Store, letting you stream Microsoft Office onto iPad

9to5 Staff | Jan 13 2012 - 5:11 am PT

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All the talk about Microsoft bringing its Office suite to the iPad has thus far failed to develop into a tangible product—at least as native apps. In the meantime, many virtualization apps cropped up on the App Store, allowing you to share a desktop virtual machine with your tablet. OnLive today jumped on the bandwagon with an interesting cloud-based solution stemming from their expertise as a provider of streaming gaming experience through their OnLive cloud gaming platform.

The OnLive Desktop app provides access to a seamless Windows desktop experience sporting Microsoft Office applications and 2GB of free cloud storage. It leverages OnLive’s video compression technology to run the Office suite in the cloud and stream rendered video onto your iPad. This is the same technology used by OnLive’s cloud-gaming platform, meaning your experience may wary depending on your broadband Internet speed, congestion and other factors affecting video streaming.

OnLive Desktop for iPad is a free download from the App Store. You will need a free account with OnLive to use the program. Both free and paid plans are available, offering up 50GB of storage, more apps, and priority access and collaboration features for businesses…

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It is worth noting that earlier this month a Silicon Valley startup brought CloudOn, a cloud-hosted Microsoft Office functionality, to the iPad as a free app.

The full press release from OnLive is available below:

OnLive® Desktop is a service that provides a seamless, no-compromise, instant-response cloud-based PC desktop, wherever and whenever you want it. OnLive brings to your iPad a high-performance PC experience, regardless of the content, even when interacting with fast-action media.

Features:

• Instantly view, edit and create documents using actual Microsoft® Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint
• Easily transfer files between OnLive Desktop and other devices
• Experience high-performance, instant-response PC applications
• Interact with lag-free animation and video

Based on groundbreaking video compression technology, OnLive harnesses the power of cloud computing to deliver a seamless, no-compromise remote PC desktop solution.