Mashed Articles

Last month, OnLive introduced its free OnLive Desktop service that allows users to run virtual instances of Microsoft Office apps streamed from OnLive’s remote PCs to the users’ iPads. The company has now added Adobe Acrobat Reader support to the service and introduced a paid “Desktop Plus” subscription service to provide enhanced functionality including priority access and a Flash- and PDF-enabled browser experience. OnLive Desktop Plus is priced at $4.99 per month.

The free OnLive Desktop App, currently available on iPad—and coming soon to Android, PC, Mac, TVs and monitors—delivers no-compromise, media-rich, instant-response Windows applications including Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint software, and as of today, Adobe Reader for PDFs, along with 2GB of cloud storage. OnLive Desktop Plus, available for $4.99/month at www.desktop.onlive.com, provides all OnLive Desktop Standard features plus OnLive’s gigabit-speed accelerated browsing experience with full Flash player capability. With OnLive Desktop Plus, the iPad not only becomes 100% Flash compatible, it becomes the world’s fastest mobile Flash player.

As with the original OnLive Desktop service, there is some lag in responding to touch input and visual artifacts when moving quickly through documents or web pages. The lag made it somewhat difficult to work with interactive Flash-based content such as games in our testing, but the service does allow for decent viewing of Flash video content on the web.

While that slight lag is a function of the time needed for data to transfer between OnLive’s servers and the user’s iPad, OnLive’s PCs themselves are connected to the Internet with gigabit connections, making for very fast loading of content and data transfers, which is then optimized for the iPad’s display and passed along to the user.

OnLive is planning yet another tier of service, a $9.99/month “Pro” level that will offer additional PC applications for use from the iPad and an upgrade from to 50 GB of storage, up from 2 GB on the regular and Plus levels.

AppleInsider reports on an interview with a representative of Hong Kong-based nonprofit Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) claiming that Foxconn used advance knowledge of recent audits by the Fair Labor Association to hide underage workers from auditors. Specifically, the report addresses the issue of 16- and 17-year olds, who are permitted to work under Apple’s supplier code of conduct if allowed under local laws, but with special restrictions on types and duration of their work.

[SACOM project officer Debby Sze Wan] Chan said she had heard from two Foxconn workers in Zhenghou last week that the manufacturer was “prepared for the inspection” by the Fair Labor Association that had been commissioned by Apple and began last week.

“All underage workers, between 16-17 years old, were not assigned any overtime work and some of them were even sent to other departments,” Chan reported the workers as having said.

Other workers reported to the agency that Foxconn had relaxed certain policies such as by adding additional break periods ahead of the audits.

Fair Labor Association president Auret van Heerden noted to Nightline’s Bill Weir in a segment that aired yesterday that his group always expects to receive “a show” when it arrives for its audits, but that its interview techniques and other strategies help to dig beneath the surface to find more accurate representations of working conditions.

Chan’s organization also focuses on issues of student labor, alleging that local Chinese governments have in some cases forced school to sent their students to Foxconn for internships even when the work is completely outside of their field of study.

Apple’s high-profile presence and Foxconn’s role as its largest manufacturing partner have cast the two firms into the spotlight over the issue of worker rights and factory conditions. The issues are of course not unique to the two companies, although Apple’s public statements and attempts transparency have also contributed to the focused attention.

Even as Apple is preparing to open its first Dutch retail store in Amsterdam on March 3, the company is moving closer to expanding its international reach even further as it has updated its Swedish jobs site with new postings for the complete range of retail positions.

We noted last November that Apple had filed a business registration certificate for Apple Retail Sweden, offering support to rumors that Apple was looking to open a retail store in Stockholm.

While the new listings do not specify Stockholm as the location for the forthcoming store, Stockholm’s metropolitan area is easily the largest in Sweden and with previous rumors having cited Stockholm as the focus of Apple’s interest, it seems likely that this is the intended market.