14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, leading retailer Amazon opened to end-users its own application storefront for devices running under Google's Android operating system, called the Amazon Appstore. The new marketplace comes with a wide range of features that can easily make users happy, and one of them would be the possibility to test drive applications from a desktop computer.
To be more precise, the “Test Drive” enables users try out an Android app through the browser on their computers, via an Android virtual machine.
Thus, users would be able to make an idea of the mobile software before purchasing and downloading it on their Android-based mobile phones.
The experience that one would receive from this virtual machine might not be similar with the one offered by the mobile phone, but it would certainly enable users decide whether they like the application or not.
For example, one would be able to play a game in the VM for around 30 minutes, which is more than enough to make a general idea on it.
“Clicking the 'Test drive now' button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers,” Amazon explains.
“When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 - just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app.
“Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.”
According to Amazon, its Appstore already has wide range of applications available for test drive, and more of them would be added in the near future.