When Amazon’s Appstore rolled out last week , we glossed over one detail that merely seemed neat. Today, we’re inclined to saythat Amazon’s Test Drive could be the most vital piece of the whole lot. Basically, Test Drive allows US customers to take apps for a spin at Amazon.com, with all of the comfort that their tried-and-true desktop web browser brings — but in preference to sit you down with a Flash-based mockup of the app, Amazon is supplying you with a taste of bona fide cloud computing with an Android virtual machine.
In other words, what you’re observing within the screenshot above isn’t only a single program, but a whole virtual Android smartphone with working mouse controls, where you cannot only attempt Paper Toss, but in addition delete it, flick through the device’s photo gallery, hearken to a couple of tunes, and even surf the internet from the working Android browser — as difficult as which may be without keyboard input. Amazon explains:
Clicking the “Test drive now” button launches a replica of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), an internet service that offers on-demand compute capacity within the cloud for developers. In the event you click the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the net to the app running on Amazon EC2 – similar to your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back in your computer. All this occurs in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as though it were running to your mobile device.
Today, Amazon’s Test Drive is really just Gaikai for cellphones — its purpose is just to sell apps, nothing more. But imagine this for a sec: what in case you were accessing your personal smartphone data, rather than the mostly blank slate of an Android emulator that Amazon provides here?
[Thanks, Ryan]
LG’s upcoming MWC lineup runs into some Italians, gets documented on video
Everything Everywhere promises ‘small-scale LTE launch’ in UK by the top of 2012
