Microsoft Office Finally Comes to Android Tablets: The Onlive Desktop App

Just yesterday, a new app came out to the Android market that is considered a game changer.  For a long time now many retail associates have said the number one thing that customers ask when looking at an Android tablet has been, "Does is have Microsoft Office?".  For a long time Android has had alternative suites that (Like the old days of Corel word perfect and others) are compatible with Microsoft Office.  Some of them are QuickOffice HD, Polaris Office and ThinkFree Office for Tablets.  Yesterday Microsoft Office was finally brought to Android Tablets with the new App Onlive Desktop.

Onlive Desktop allows you to use a virtual console that looks identical to Windows 7.  In doing so you are allowed access to the full versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint.  You also have the application Adobe Reader, but this is not to appealing for Android users, since we already have Adobe Reader for our tablets.  The other exciting part is you have 2GB of online storage space with the App.  This allows you to sign into the Onlive Desktop website (which you will need to prior to the download to sign up for it), and once you are signed in you can upload almost every document you could ever need.  Also every document, spreadsheet and presentation is saved onto that same online cloud storage which you can access from any computer.

Finally I know some of my readers are wondering what's the catch?  Well there's two catches actually.  The first one doesn't really matter to us, because we are Android users.  You see this app is also available for iPads and for that reason they offer a monthly service so that you can use Internet Explorer and Adobe Flash.  This isn't really needed for Android users since we have better web browsers than Internet Explorer and we already have Adobe Flash unlike Apple.  The second catch is that the keyboard that is built in on the app is poor quality to say the least.  This can easily be resolved however by using a bluetooth keyboard, I recommend the ones made for Android.  When I was testing it out that's what I used, and I felt like I was on my desktop at home.  Onlive Desktop has finally brought Microsoft Office to Android, so go download and enjoy.

Here's a Video demo of the app from my new YouTube Channel. Hope you like it.


This is R-I-C-K-Y, The Android Guy