AMD Partners With BlueStacks To Bring Android Apps To PCs 143
eldavojohn writes "News outlets are reporting that AMD has partnered with BlueStacks to bring Android apps to AppZone Player, something that will apparently allow the more than 500,000 mobile apps to run on your PC. From their announcement: 'What's special about the player on AMD-based products? There are many challenges with running apps that were originally designed for phones or tablets on a PC that in most cases has a larger screen and higher resolution display. To solve this, BlueStacks has designed and optimized the player for AMD Radeon graphics and in particular, our OpenGL drivers found in our APUs and GPUs so you get a great 'big-screen' experience. Additionally, the apps are integrated into AppZone, our online showcase and one-stop-shop for apps accelerated by AMD technology.' Unfortunately this appears to only work on AMD-based PCs (although nowhere does it say that it won't work on Intel CPUs or non-Radeon GPUs). Also no word on how they overcame the difference between a mouse and touchscreen (think pinch to zoom)."
Re:Control differences (Score:4, Interesting)
Rotation is easily handled - moving the mouse left/right while holding the mousewheel down, for example. Unless there's also a need for panning while simultaneously zooming and rotating, of course.
On the other hand, how many apps do the two-finger rotation thing? And how many of those have you cursed for having it because every time you merely want to zoom, the app decides that you also want to rotate the view by 1 degree?
I see the lack of an accelerometer in most computers as a bigger issue. Even when it does have an accelerometer, that also happens to be accessible (perhaps as part of a laptop's mechanisms to help prevent damage to HDDs), a laptop isn't exactly something you start tilting around to e.g. play a racing game.
Still, there's plenty of apps that don't even need those things or you can make do with a kludge.
Re:Blah.blah..marketing..marteting..blah (Score:4, Interesting)
Because you find an app that you wish you had it on your desktop? Duh!
Case in point, the Tango app became very popular in my friends circle. Even when I was in front my laptop, I had to use my phone to video chat with someone. Until recently they did not have a desktop application. I would have definitely used this tool, if I could have.