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Desktop.com: Long on Vision, Short on Apps

Web-based portable desktop stutters, but it has time and room to grow.

Dan Littman, special to PC World

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The idea behind Desktop.com is great: A Web site that lets you use any PC as if it were your own. All of your familiar files and documents can be at your fingertips, whether you're in a high-rise office in Peru or an Internet cafe in Pakistan.

But based on the first live version of Desktop.com, which rolled out this week, I have to say that reality might not be ready for this idea.

My first disappointment was performance. The Desktop.com interface is excruciatingly unresponsive: It often takes a minute or longer to acknowledge a button click or an attempt to drag a window, it can't keep up with a fast typist, and sometimes it ignores the user and grinds away for five or ten minutes at a stretch.

I tried it over a high-speed corporate T1 connection, so bandwidth is probably not at fault; more likely it is Desktop.com's pure Java design.

Although Desktop.com is supposed to work with any 4.0 or later browser, it didn't get along well with Netscape Navigator 4.05. I checked it out mainly using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.

The newly hatched Desktop.com also lacks compelling applications. For example, a presentation-design tool might be especially welcome to traveling salespeople; a word processor, to anyone who wants to write sporadically during a vacation trip.

At launch it offers only a few solitary games, a stock-price graphing utility, a very basic to-do list, a utility that downloads headlines from a few major news sources, and links to a few existing Web applications, such as the AnyDay scheduler and YahooMail. It also allows you to create a list of your favorite Web sites. These bookmark equivalents can also be displayed as icons on your Desktop.com desktop.

If You Build It, Will Apps Come?

Desktop.com expects third-party developers to produce applications, which you will then be able to use as if you'd installed them on your own PC. To facilitate this, the company is promoting development tools for the Desktop.com environment. But it faces the chicken-and-egg problem that confronts every new platform: Consumers won't adopt a platform until there are plenty of apps for it, and developers won't produce the apps until there are plenty of consumers to use them.

Desktop.com already does hold some useful tools. You can upload and store files to access from another PC, though the 10MB limit could cramp your style. You can also create private folders, which you can access from any PC, or create folders to share with friends or colleagues anywhere in the world.

But those capabilities are available from other Web sites too. Until Desktop.com is furnished with a good selection of software, it will feel more like a house than a home.

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