Windows 7 On the Apple iPad (Thanks to Citrix)

Oh, ye of little faith. Those who mocked the iPad and called it a foolish endeavor; a gadget that would never see the light of enterprise adoption. But now, thanks to Citrix, you can have your Windows 7 experience right at your fingertips. For those who don’t know, Citrix has developed receiver software for the iPhone that’s been in the loop for quite a while. Now it’s coming to Apple’s iPad. Interested, now?

Ready for the launch in March, Citrix has based the receiver client on the existing iPhone version. In an InfoWorld article, Citrix Vice President Chris Fleck is quoted from his blog: “If your company has XenDesktop or XenApp  you will be happy to know you will be able to use your iPad for real work as well…It turns out the 9.7-inch display on the iPad with a 1024×768 screen resolution works great for a full-VDI XenDesktop. Windows applications run unmodified and securely in the data center, and even multiple applications at once.”

There’s no doubt it’ll be a great experience. Since they perfected it to work on the iPhone (thought it was hard to deal with screen restriction) Citrix boasts that the iPad’s 1024 x 768 resolution screen makes it massively useful. Still on his blog, Fleck stated ” The iPad looks to be an ideal end-point device that can empower users to be productive wherever they are and IT will be able to safely deliver company-hosted virtual desktops and apps without worry,” The proof? The above picture is actually from Fleck’s blog. It’s a screen shot of the iPhone app running inside the iPad SDK Simulator.

There’s farther reaching implications than just having a virtualized Windows 7 box running in your hands. Couple the iPad with the keyboard dock, and you’ve got yourself a pretty nice thin-client for nearly any employee. Since Windows 7 has been designed to be tablet friendly, it’ll almost seem like a perfect match (I’d imagine).

Don’t scoff. Apple’s 1Gz processor has enough oomph to power through nearly anything that’d been designed correctly for it. Plus, this also gets around the multi-tasking issue that the iPhone OS has. When you virtualize the whole thing on another machine, you can still multi-task in the Windows or Linux environment. (Dare I say, eventual implementation for OS X virtualization?)