Content area
Full Text
Have you ever wanted to run the apps on your Android phone or tablet on your PC? Or would you like to use Android apps even if you don't own an Android device? An innovative application, named BlueStacks, lets you do exactly this: With it, you can install and run Android apps on a Windows computer.
Best free Android apps
Installing it
The current version of BlueStacks is Beta-1, and for now you can get it for free. (A final release to come will be sold, but pricing has yet to be announced.)
You download and run an installer program, which, in turn, downloads the actual code for BlueStacks and installs it.
I installed it on two notebooks: one with an Intel Pentium Dual-Core 2.2GHz processor with 4GB and running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; the other with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.5GHz processor with 1GB and running Windows 8 Consumer Preview 32-bit.
I figured that I might as well test BlueStacks on the next version of Windows since it will be an OS also for tablets.
On the notebook with the Core 2 Duo processor, the installer downloaded a "limited version" of BlueStacks because it said that the graphics chipset in the computer wasn't powerful enough to render the graphics of some Android apps. The BlueStacks site doesn't list the graphics chipsets it supports.
The user interface
Upon complete installation, BlueStacks places two shortcuts on the Windows desktop: "Start BlueStacks" and "Android Apps."
(Android Apps opens a folder containing shortcuts that launch the individual Android apps installed in BlueStacks.) A BlueStacks icon utility is also placed in the Notification Area of Windows.
There's a widget set along the top of the Windows desktop that works like the Mac OS X's Dock program launcher. It lists icons for "My Apps," "Popular Downloads," "App Stores" and "Cloud Connect."
Clicking My Apps opens a window showing icons of the apps installed in BlueStacks. Among Popular Downloads, there's Angry Birds, Facebook and YouTube available to download and install. Within App Stores, the Amazon "Appstore" is listed along with two lesser known ones: 1Mobile Market and GetJar. (Google's own Android app store, Play Store, isn't listed.)
When you launch the actual BlueStacks application, a main display window...