VMware’s New iPad App Slated For 2011
You can watch the short video on YouTube below:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY4gKCGA-Cg[/youtube]
At VMware World in Copenhagen, Scott Davis, CTO of End User Computing, showed off the VMware iPad application. It looks as though VMware is hoping to innovate and also disrupt the market with their portal application, which is slated for a 2011 launch. Read on for the details and impressions…
You can watch the short video on YouTube below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY4gKCGA-Cg
Here’s what this blogger can say about the brief demo and his own experiences with these apps:
- If there’s under-the-hood speed-ups to the VM experience, they don’t translate well in a demo, but it was impressive that they were over public Internet in Copenhagen and the VM was in Palo Alto, CA.
- The virtual touch-pad innovation is smart, especially for Windows applications that require more than tapping the screen to move your cursor (which could translate to erroneous mouse clicks).
- The keyboard function-key overlay is something I’ve see with the Citrix app, and a few other VNC-related applications. Using three fingers to bring up the keyboard is something I *haven’t* seen, and if VMware implements more smart touch features like that, it could mean greater usability than traditional applications. (The iPad can support 11 simultaneous touches, so let’s use them.)
Overall, the app has all the features you’d come to expect and want, with a few added bonuses, so the real deciding factor on whether this takes off or just remains a fun tech-demo is if people actually adopt it. Virtualization on mobile platforms has yet to prove itself “useful” in the conventional sense that actual work can be done on it. The user interface is always hard to translate.
But this blogger thinks there’s a chance for VMware’s iPad app pickup speed simply because VMware solutions are becoming more ubiquitous, along with the fact that VMware has solutions for the individual, allowing a one or two people company to get in on VM use without having to deploy bigger and more expensive Citrix and Hyper-V environments.
How many road-warriors out there are looking forward to this?
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Cool video/demo and very exciting app. I can think of a lot of times where I could use something like that with a functioning GUI, but there are a lot of hurdles to overcome.
Even without a full gui environment, like Windows, OSX, Gnome, ect, I can still think of a bunch of ways to utilize being able to virtualize a Linux kernel on a mobile device.
So, even with a less than perfect mouse interface, I still think it is super cool. I would love to be able to carry around a mobile webserver/php/mysql server in my pocket 🙂
For coming out a year or so later than Citrix’s Xendesktop client I would have expected more than a 3 finger gesture and the virtual touchpad. They got some catching up to do.
Any why can’t one or two people run Citrix’s xendesktop express for free?
Are you kidding? This is old news. This is pretty weak for being so late to the game.
Kyle, George G: The VAR Guy welcomes constructive criticism such as yours. But can you please disclose whom you work for? A VAR? A VMware rival? Someone else?
-TVG