How To Control Your Pc With Your Ipad
If you,ve got an iPad kicking around your home or office
, and you own a Windows laptop or desktop machine, you,ve probably already experienced the frustration of not being able to do something on the iPad that,s easy on the PC. Watching a non-YouTube video, playing a game that,s not on the iPad, editing Microsoft Office documents - wouldn,t it be great if you could run your PC from your iPad whenever you hit an Apple roadblock?
You can, for $6.99. Splashtop Remote is an iPad app that pairs with a free Windows application to display your PC screen on your iPad, provided both are on the same wireless network. Splashtop is the name of a small quick-boot program that comes pre-installed on many PCs. You may know it as Lenovo Quick Start, Asus ExpressGate, or HP QuickWeb. Splashtop Remote is made by the same company, Device VM. The company, which employs hundreds of software engineers in the US, China and elsewhere to build, test and debug its wares, has a reputation for building small, fast, bug-free programs. Splashtop Remote is no exception.
All you need to do is buy the Splashtop Remote app from Apple,s iTunes Store, and download the small 10-megabyte Splashtop Remote application for your PC. Fire up the PC program and set a password. Then tap Splashtop Remote on your iPad. It will automatically find your PC. Punch in the password and blam, your PC,s screen appears on your iPad. A welcome screen lets you know the special iPad touchscreen moves you,ll need to control it. Tapping anything onscreen is equivalent to left-clicking it. To right-click, you press and hold down. It takes a few minutes to get used to it, but if your goal is simply to play a Web video or work on a document in Microsoft Word, Splashtop is refreshingly easy to use. It augments the iPad,s touchscreen keyboard with extra keys that perform important Windows commands such as Ctrl-C.
I,ve been using Splashtop Remote to play my PC,s iTunes music and video collection. Instead of running the iPad,s version of iTunes, for which I,d have to sync my music library over and over, I connect to my PC and run iTunes from there. It,s fast and it sounds great. I can use the PC iTunes, audio equalizer to optimize the sound that comes out of my iPad. It,s especially great for playing Web video. Apple refuses to run the Flash players used by most sites for video, but playing them inside a browser on my PC works great.
For finesse, I,ve been running the Apple Safari browser on my PC from my iPad. I can play two Flash videos simultaneously without skipping a frame. By making a twist motion on the iPad,s touchscreen, I can tell Splashtop to either play videos at full pixel-for-pixel resolution, or to downgrade a bit on quality in order to play more smoothly. But connected to a late-model PC, the video plays just fine at full resolution. I sometimes forget I,m running everything remotely. For seven dollars and two minutes of setup, it,s both a breakthrough and a bargain.
Splashtop Remote does have some limitations. If your PC runs Windows XP instead of Vista or Windows 7, you won,t hear the audio from your PC. It also helps to have a fairly new PC that can run Splashtop at full speed without hesitations. My 2010 HP Envy 14 worked great, but at one point it warned me to reconfigure its Windows color settings to improve performance. I also tried connecting to my underpowered HP Mini 110 netbook. Video was sputtery, and Microsoft Word lagged.
Most important, DeviceVM doesn,t hawk Splashtop Remote as an on-the-road solution to connect to your home computer, in the style of GoToMyPC. The company plans to add support for roaming beyond your firewall but primarily it,s meant to be used on a local Wi-Fi network, where connection is automatic and performance is super-fast. As demonstrated by Steve Jobs, the primary function of an iPad isn,t to replace your laptop as a mobile computer. It,s meant for curling up in a comfortable spot without the extra weight and lower battery life of a laptop. What Splashtop Remote does is eliminate one more reason you might have to put down your iPad and get up from your favorite seat.
by: Sanjay Shenoy
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