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Access your Desktop Anytime, Anywhere
We've all been using free mail accounts, instant messengers, and even online office suites. What if all of them could be integrated in your own online operating system? Enter a new powerful trend of WebOS
Sanjay Majumder
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
With due respect to our dependence on PCs, the latest fad is to move away
from them and access everything from anywhere. “What's so great about that?” you
may ask. Today, you can access your e-mail, run an office suite, and even store
your data online. All this is available from anywhere over the Internet. The
trouble is that all these applications lie in their own separate islands, with
separate user ids and passwords. For instance, you might have an e-mail account
with Google, an Instant Messenger account with Yahoo!, might be using something
like rBack for online data storage, etc. You'll have to access all of them
separately. There was nothing available to tie them together, until recently
when the concept of WebOS came into being. This is the latest trend in the
online world. As the name suggests, a WebOS is a web-based operating system. It
gives you your own personalized desktop on the Internet, with your own
shortcuts, applications, start menu, and much more. The concept borrows from
some of the technologies available in Web 2.0. There are quite a few Web based
OSes available on the Internet, and we checked out ten of them to do this story.
Accessing a WebOS is as simple as accessing your GMail or Yahoo! Mail accounts.
Benefits and drawbacks
With a WebOS, you get lots of advantages-you needn't carry a laptop to
access your data. You don't have to buy any application licenses. In fact, out
of the ten WebOSes that we tested,eight are free.
You can also create community groups, which allows you to share files with
other community members. For example, while on the move, you need an important
file from your office desktop. What will you do? Of course you will ask your
colleague to mail you that file. But what if the file is too huge and mailing it
is time consuming, or may be your mail server will reject such a huge file
attachment. Your colleague may try to send it by using services like GMail, but
with due respect to its size, GMail's spam control may discard that mail. In
such a scenario benefits of community groups shows up. Your colleague can upload
the file on his virtual desktop hosted on the Web and you being a part of their
group can readily share and access that file. It's like having a mini-online
network. The concept of WebOS could also be used in DTH consoles that come with
built-in Web browsers and Internet access facilities. In such a case, you don't
need to buy a PC for home. You'll have your own OS hosted online, which you can
access using your TV as the monitor.
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| Nivio is one of the few paid,
online operating systems. It provides more than 700 applications and 1 GB of
storage space. Plus, you get other benefits like the ability to install your
own applications, which is something most of the others don't offer |
WebOSes also provide multimedia capabilities and hence, allows you to play
music, view and share audio/video files. WebOSes like oDesktop, Nivio and ORCA
provide this functionality.
While the concept of a WebOS sounds great, there are still quite a few rough
edges that need to be smoothened, and quite a few limitations that need to be
overcome. For instance, in case of a WebOS that offers multimedia capabilities,
you'll need to upload your audio/video files to it. That would require oodles of
bandwidth, because even a small Mp3 file can be a few MB. Page(s) 1 2
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