You use your iPad to surf, watch movies, listen to music, read and play games. It is less likely that you engage in many “productive” type activities on Apple’s popular tablet, despite business apps that take the place of or complement similar programs on your PC or Mac. There are just too many hassles – you can’t run certain programs; there’s no physical keyboard; connectivity can be poor. You continue to schlep a laptop.
On Tuesday, Parallels – a company that made its mark letting folks run “virtualized” versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system on a Macintosh computer – launched a new subscription service called Parallels Access, which can help free you up so that the iPad is the only computer you take on the road.
Parallels Access lets you use an iPad to access your home or office PC or Mac from afar. Yeah, we’ve seen that sort of thing before. The big deal here is that you can use any and all of the programs that reside on your remote computers – the proprietary program your company uses, Microsoft Office, or Quicken on your PC at home. And you can interact with those applications on the tablet as if each were designed for the iPad.
You can start any PC or Mac “desktop” application on the iPad from a launcher screen. There’s an easy-to-access app switcher that lets you go from one program to another.
I tried Parallels Access on an Apple iMac, a Dell laptop running Windows 7 and a Microsoft Surface tablet PC running Windows 8. Parallels Access mainly delivered on its promise, though I certainly uncovered blemishes.
How it works
When Parallels “applifies” PC/Mac programs – the company’s lingo, not mine – the software is modified on the tablet to display iPad-style buttons for actions such as copy/paste/select. If you have an application open, it fills the entire iPad screen.
You engage with these as you would most iPad apps, with various touch gestures substituting for the mouse actions on your computer. Tapping on the iPad is like clicking the mouse. A two-finger tap is the same as a right click. Spread and close your fingers to zoom in an out.
If you tap and hold your finger on the display when tweaking, say, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that resides on your computer, you’ll see a familiar iPad “magnifying glass” to magnify the text or numbers. Release your finger, and contextual buttons appear for such things as cut and copy and paste. In fact, you can copy something off your computer, and paste it into an iPad app, though the feature didn’t always work.
Using gestures, you can enlarge a column or picture, drag and drop, and scroll. You have the option to display a mouse pointer.
If you’re on a Mac running a Windows “virtual machine” through Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac, your PC programs will also be applified on the iPad.
Moreover, if the PC or Mac program can play music, you can hear those tunes on the iPad, too – and so as not to disturb the people back home or in the office, the sound won’t be heard there. Another helpful feature: You can use your voice to dictate text.
The keyboard issue
The lack of a physical keyboard on an iPad remains a primary reason why Parallels Access still isn’t a perfect solution in all cases. But Parallels thought this out. It supplies the appropriate onscreen keyboards with the dedicated special keys used on either a Mac or Windows keyboard. And you can always use Parallels Access with a wireless physical Blue-tooth keyboard.
To preserve your privacy, you can “lock” your PC or Mac to show a blank screen when you’re connected remotely. You can also require a password before anyone logs in. But the PC you’re connecting to remotely cannot be asleep, much less offline.
Not all the pain points have disappeared. Parallels claims that the service works well even in low bandwidth situations, but when my connectivity was lousy, so was Parallels’ performance.
Moreover, I was unable to access some of the proprietary software that I use in the office. Certain specific network “ports” must be opened, which might require intervention from your company’s IT department. Parallels Access must make nice with both the network that the computer is on and the network that the iPad is on.
To get started, you download a free app on the iPad from the App Store. You separately download an “agent” program on each PC or Mac that you want to access. The cost is $79.99 per year per remote computer, so the price can add up if you want to have access to multiple machines. You’ll need an iPad 2, 3 or 4, or an iPad Mini and a Mac running OS X (Mountain Lion, Lion, Mavericks) or a PC running Windows 7 or Windows 8.
Parallels Access is a promising step forward that can lighten your load. But you may not want to ditch the laptop just yet.