Splashtop is similar to TeamViewer,
although there are some major differences. There’s a desktop version called
Streamer, which is installed on the computer that you want to remotely access.
It comes in Windows PC and Apple Mac flavours, but not Linux. What’s different
about this remote access software is that you can’t access a computer from a
computer. You can only access a computer from an Android or iOS tablet or
phone. This limitation will put off some users and it makes is less useful than
TeamViewer, which runs everywhere.
Splashtop
Remote Desktop
When the Splashtop Streamer is first run,
it prompts you to create a Splashtop account. This is free and just requires an
email address and a password. You can then log in and the computer is
registered with Splashtop. This is so that other computers and devices running
Splashtop can access it. You then need to install an app on the device that is
to access the computer. There are versions for Windows and Apple Mac, Android
and iOS, and even Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble Nook, BlackBerry PlayBook and
others.
I tried it on a Google Nexus 7, mainly
because it’s free, whereas it costs $8 on the iPad and that’s a special sale
price. It is just 69p for the iPhone, but do you want to access a desktop PC
with a big screen on such a small device? The free Splashtop 2 HD app for
Android installed in a few seconds and then you just log in to your Splashtop
account. The home screen shows a list of computers that are running Splashtop
and you aren’t limited to just one; there can be as many as you want. Tap the
computer you want to connect to and its desktop is displayed on the screen.
Although access to your account is password protected, an additional password
can be added, so each of your computers can be password protected too.
The quality of the screen display is
excellent and the image on the tablet or phone is nearly as good as the real
desktop. Although the quality is high, it does affect the performance, and it
appeared to be sluggish when using Windows. Drag your finger around the screen
and the mouse cursor can trail quite a long way behind it. Zooming in and out
is with pinch and spread, and a three-fingered touch can be used to scroll the
screen in any direction. It’s not quite as intuitive as TeamViewer, and using
it to access software running on a Windows PC wasn’t quite so good on the
Google Nexus 7.
It claims to be 15 times faster than
competitors, but it didn’t feel very responsive. In the Performance section of
the website the company quotes frame-rates and video latency. With its
excellent image quality I think this app is designed for running Flash content
and watching videos on tablets and smartphones. It would certainly give you a
better experience watching movies on your tablet than many rival remote access
applications, because this is where it excels.
There are a number of other apps for
Splashtop and they are quite innovative. For example, there’s XDisplay, which
turns an iPad into a second wireless monitor for your PC. This is a brilliant
idea and all you need to do is to stand the iPad next to the PC’s monitor and
you can drag windows over to it. This and apps like Whiteboard, Presenter,
Touchpad and others are interesting, but they aren’t about remotely accessing
your PC, so they won’t be covered here. Check them out if you’re interested.
Join.me
Join.me is an interesting service that
provides a form of remote access. With TeamViewer, Splashtop and others, you
can set it running before you leave home or work or wherever the PC is and then
access it remotely from another location on another PC. With Join.me there
needs to be another person at the remote computer, because when you try to
connect, it asks for the user’s permission. They must click to accept the
remote connection.
Join.me
is an interesting service that provides a form of remote access.
It’s designed for screen sharing at
meetings, and one person downloads and runs the Join.me software. When it’s
run, it displays a nine-digit code number on the screen. Anyone who wants to
view that user’s screen can simply go to the join.me website and enter the
code. The remote desktop is displayed in the browser window. There’s a button
in a little control panel at the top of the page to ask permission to take
control and from then on you can open windows, run software and so on. It’s not
the best or the fastest screen display, but it’s okay and it’s super quick and
simple to set up.
In addition to meetings, it’s useful for
technical support too. Just ask the person to run Join.me Basic free and they
can email the code to you or phone you. It’s not useful if you want to access
your own PC, because you won’t be there to accept the connection.
VNC
Virtual network computing is basically a
system for viewing and accessing another computer remotely over a network or
the internet. The code is open source and many remote access programs are based
on it. TightVNC, UltraVNC and RealVNC are all variations of VNC as you can
guess from their names. All of them are free, but the free version of RealVNC
has a limited feature set. There are Personal and Enterprise versions that add
extras like file transfers, encrypted communications, printing, chat and so on.
All VNC applications are basically the same, so to a certain degree you can mix
and match the server software that runs on the remote computer that you want to
access and the viewer, which runs on the computer that accesses it.
Virtual
network computing is basically a system for viewing and accessing another
computer remotely over a network or the internet.
TightVNC is available in 32-bit and 64-bit
Windows versions. It runs as a service in the background, so it’s always
available or it can be run as an application when you need it. To access the
computer running TightVNC, a Java viewer is used. As it’s a standard Java
application, any computer and operating system with Java can be used to access
the remote PC, such as Windows, OS X and Linux. It has useful controls to set
the image quality of the remote PC and you can adjust the quality to match the
network speed.
Because VNC is open source, other people
have created viewers and there are several to choose from for Android phones
and tablets. Android-VNC-Viewer is a popular choice, but MultiVNC, Mocha VNC
Lite, and Jump Desktop Free are also available. They’re all free in the Google
Play Store. A search for VNC at the iOS App Store will also reveal many remote
access apps, such as Mocha VNC Lite, VNC Viewer, and Connect My Mac. The
Android VNC viewers apps weren’t quite as good as TeamViewer when it comes to
using Windows, but they’re okay. The image quality could be set quite high, but
the update speed was a bit sluggish.
If your Android phone or tablet is rooted,
you might want to experiment with VNC servers. There are several apps, which
enable you to control your Android device from the PC with a reverse remote
control connection. I’m not sure why you would want to, but it’s certainly
worth investigating if you want to use Android apps on your PC.
One thing worth bearing in mind with VNC
servers is that they often require you to configure port forwarding on the
router if you want to access your PC over the internet. On a local area
network, all that is required is the IP address of the computer to connect to,
but this isn’t possible over the internet without port forwarding
