Access mails, files, music, news feeds, chat with colleagues is all what you do with internet in your office, college or at home. But then every time you wish to do that you need a lot many things installed on your system like the web browser, messenger, office, PDF reader, etc. Although it is installed only once it is available to you only on your own system. A lot many things are not made available if you are in cyber café , college computers or at office.
Here’s another option for road warriors that believe in traveling light; Operating systems that run within the confines of your web browser. With such a service you could access your data from any internet connected device, anywhere in the world since everything would be online. This is an operating system with all the components loaded for you usage of the internet.
An online operating system (OLOS), also known as webOS, is one that runs inside your web browser and contain various features and functions within it, like online storage space, chat clients, calendar, MP3 player, RSS reader and so on. Most of these operating systems are built using flash, which makes the whole experience very intuitive. But flash based applications do gobble up a lot of bandwidth and this could make your interactive experience a little bit slow if you are on a slow connection. However, with the broadband speed increasing 10 times (200kbps to 2Mbps) over the past 5 yrs, the experience is going to be simply superb at the time when the advanced version of these OS would be launched.
There are plenty of such services that you could choose from. Though most of these webOSs are still in their early stages, they do look promising. Here are few of the most promising ones.
DesktopTwo:
Though DesktopTwo is in beta stage, you will be astonished with the features it has to offer. What you have at your disposal is 1 GB of online space, website editor, and support for POP email, blogging, MP3 player and instant messenger, to name a few.
You can also read your documents, including formats such as PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT and chat directly with another DesktopTwo user using a chat client, Live. Once you sign up at the site you can straightway make use of your new email address, @desktoptwo.com. Now to access your page simply log in. Here you can choose to either go in for a windowed, full screen or a current window view. Unfortunately, each time I tried to log in while using both Firefox and IE, I was greeted only by an error message or redirected to the home page.
Glide:
Glide is another flash-based online OS that offers features almost similar to DesktopTwo.
As far as registration goes there are different options to choose from, including ones that will cost you money. The free plans include ‘free individual’ and a ‘free family’ plans. While the former offers 300MB of online space the latter offers 1 GB of online space and supports four users. The plans go all the way up to ‘Family Premium yearly’, where you are offered 8 GB of online space and support for upto 8 users. But this package will cost you $149.95 a year.
For free users, during the registration process, you will need to provide your cell phone number on which you will receive code via SMS. As said earlier, the features offered by glide are similar to DesktopTwo, which include 1GB file storage, RSS feed and IM. You can also create documents and view pictures. What sets this one apart is its simple and intuitive interface.
Goowy:
As the site mentions, the creators chose to call this webOS ‘Goowy’ so that it can be playful and easy to remember at the same time. This is another neat looking web based operating system with useful applications and games. Other features include file-uploading facility, RSS reader, instant messaging, bookmarks and so on.
To register, you simply need to fill in a few details on the main page and you are ready to go. The whole process is real quick and within seconds you can access your online OS page. If you like computer games, you will particularly enjoying using this OS as there are dozens of games to choose from various genres. The other applications can be accessed by clicking one of the icons that are neatly stacked at the bottom of the screen. With this webOS you get an option to enter your yahoo, msn, IQ id and chat in a similar way as your client messenger system would do, however with certain features disabled. This eliminates the need to install client messengers on the system.
Of all the three online OSs I took a look at, I found this one to be most rich and easy to operate. But there are a few interface glitches that hopefully will be fixed soon.
Apart from these there are many more webOS, all in alpha or beta stages like eyeOS, youOS, googleOS which are certainly going to make impact on the webOS domain.
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