OnLive Desktop For iPad Released

OnLive Desktop gone live in Apple's App Store, offering iPad owners instant access to a cloud-based Windows desktop complete with Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Announced earlier in the week, OnLive Desktop – which is a free download [iTunes link] and currently has no ongoing subscription charges for the basic package – allows documents to be viewed, created and edited, with the promise of more apps incoming soon.

Free account users get 2GB of cloud storage to host their files, along with access to the Microsoft Office suite of PowerPoint, Word and Excel. There are also a few basic utilities and games, though true gamers should probably look to OnLive's traditional cloud-based gaming package of full titles.

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However, in the pipeline is OnLive Desktop Pro, a more advanced version of the service that boosts an account to 50GB of cloud storage, gives "accelerated priority access" to the remote servers, and bundles additional apps and features for $9.99 per month. Both free and pro packages mix together multitouch gestures, onscreen keyboards and even handwriting recognition, in an attempt to blend the best of the iOS and Windows worlds.

Sharing files between OnLive Desktop and other devices is supported, and an Android version is in the pipeline. You can download it from iTunes now [iTunes link].

[Thanks Carl!]