Where do you shop for NetBook Apps? Intel AppUp seems to be the answer – A review

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There’s the ever growing Apple’s App Center that’s been like the Bread and Butter of Apple for quite sometime now. Then we had the Google get into that market to spoil Apple’s party with the Android Market place. Now we have most of the major mobile maker’s have their own Market Place or App center’s like Ovi on Nokia or the Samsung’s App Center. When all this was frantically happening looks like Intel go a clue of where things would head-up and that’s when they have come up with the Intel AppUp Center.

This review is all about the Intel AppUp Center and the cool possibilities that it offers. Currently this is the only App market place for PC / Laptop / Netbook environment. It was initially designed for the upcoming Moblin/Maemo platform before Intel realised it that the App center could be consumed by the masseses. The good thing is that it is more of an app holding other apps rather than anything weird bundled into the OS shell. So, this alone raises our hope that it should soon be available on multiple platforms say – Linux / Mac running Intel Chips ofcourse.

It’s very simple and straight forward to get Intel AppUp loaded on your PC – head over to the Intel AppUp page and download the installer and in a few minutes you have the App Store up and running on your PC/NetBook. Once you have the Intel AppUp application simply create a login and voila you are ready to rock. But be warned that some of the best apps are(as expected) on the PAID teritory and in that case you will need to give your credit-card details too. But the good thing is that unlike the Apple / Android App store you don’t have a few minutes to decide if the app is right for you – Intel has been very genrous on this front by offering a whole 24hrs after which you are actually billed for the purchase of the app.

Now lets dive deep into what’s all in offer at the Intel AppUp Store – you have most of the famous and relevant apps starting from the ever loving piggies in Angry Birds to the New York Times in all it’s glory. I played around with 10-12 apps varying from productivity apps to games to what-not and here’s my take on it. The purchasing option is very straight forward once you have the Credit Card setup. The problem I see is with the size of the apps themselves, every simple apps are atleast 20-30% larger in foot-print than the similar ones in other platforms – but my guess here is that the screen size is bigger to support than the small screens of the iPhone or iPad or Froyo or GingerBread – so it’s worth that extra code!!

The Intel AppUp Center has a very appealing UI I would say that’s crisp and clean. This makes navigation within the store/site a very simple affair. The Intel AppUp Center has many categories that one would come to expect like hottest apps, new releases, staff recommendations and also the top reserved for a five apps that are simply amazing and eye catching.

The coolest thing I liked is the feature where if you purchase an app on a single machine – you can have the same app up and running on 5 other machines that use your same login credentials. Now you can have the same apps on your desktop, laptop(s) and your netbook too. This brings me to another nice point – PRICE, that’s been more or less the same kind of price that I would pay in other eco-systems too, so really no complains on that front. But one thing I noticed was that all the downloaded / purchased apps themselves run independently without anything to do from the Intel AppUp center – that’s really nice for me. So for me the Intel AppUp center looks more of a store concept rather than a platform concept.

The Intel AppUp application and all the apps on the app store are optimized for the max performance on the Intel Atom family of processor – the tiny yet powerful processors that power most of the netBooks today. There’s already talk that all Intel Atom powered netbooks will soon come with AppUp center pre-installed, that if true, will increase the market share by loads. Intel has truly taken a bold initiative on the social / app front which is surely going to pay rich dividends as the app worlds get shaped in the near future.

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