OnLive is a company that has been claiming to do the seemingly impossible -- they plan to set up a sort of "cloud gaming" console, where instead of hardware in individual houses (like we have now; you buy a console for your home), they'll have hardware over the Internet, and stream your game to you like watching television. All of the processing and coding will be done on a remote server, but with signals flowing from your controller, it'll seem like you're just playing Xbox at home. It all works in theory, but in practice, Internet connections aren't solid or stable enough to send commands and full HD video back and forth without enough lag to make things unplayable.

Still, without actually releasing a product so far, OnLive claims they can do it, and now they're claiming to do it on the iPhone as well. AppleInsider reports that at a recent event in New York, OnLive showed off the same game service running on "2 iPhones, a tv, and a computer" simultaneously, with gamers on all the devices able to communicate and watch each others' gameplay. CEO Steve Perlman admits it's a "tech demo," but doesn't go into detail on what that means (it could simply be a demo running separately on the devices, to show what it would be like, or I've heard of OnLive events where the server is sitting in the room next door). And of course, there's no date or information on an actual release yet.

OnLive's service definitely sounds possible someday -- as Internet connections get faster and hardware gets even cheaper, it's not a stretch to think we'll eventually move the heavy processor lifting to another location, leaving much tinier consoles and PCs taking up space on our desks and TV stands at home. But so far all it seems they've got is an idea (and the money that excited financiers have put into the project). We'll have to believe it works when we see it.

You have waited with varying degrees of patience, but your wait is over: the MobileMe iDisk app, in all its officialness, is now available on the App Store.

The iDisk app allows you to view the contents of your MobileMe iDisk straight from your iPhone, and offers some nice options, such as adjusting the amount of local storage used on the phone for recently viewed files.

Does it live up to your expectations? Check it out, and be sure to tell us in the comments what you think about it!

[H/T AppAdvice.com]

When word about the Pogoplug hit TUAW central, we debated to see who would luck out and and cover the device. Apart from a few cuts and bruises, nearly all of which will mend in a matter of weeks if the doctors are to be believed, I won. The past few days, I've had the pleasure of road testing a unit. And it's awesome.

The Pogoplug offers a USB NAS adapter, i.e. a network-attached storage system, that gives you network access to your data from home and on the road. With NAS you can use common protocols like AFP and SMB to connect to a remote disk. And you can do so easily. That's a big win, because choosing and setting up these remote devices has been a deal killer for many otherwise interested people. As Brad Dietrich, Pogoplug's CTO, told TUAW, "[Until now], the state of home networking has been too complicated and geeky for most people." Pogoplug provides a simple solution.

What Pogoplug brings to the party is a remarkable ease of use that crosses past any issues of firewalls and port setup and delivers remote storage to normal (i.e. read "non-geek") humans. It transforms remote file access into a consumer device. And best of all, it provides this for just $99.

Among the crowded field of cloud sharing and file synchronization services, there are plenty of interesting options (we've been partial to Dropbox around here, but check around for more), but when you add 'must work well with iPhone' to the requirements list, the choices narrow a bit. I've been testing out two business-focused options in Readdle Docs and box.net, and two other iPhone-friendly options (ZumoDrive and Drop.io) have just poked above the horizon.

Readdle Docs may be on the pricey side for the App Store at $9.99US, but there's a lot of functionality bundled into that ten bucks. In addition to turning your iPhone or iPod touch into a WebDAV file server -- accessible easily and securely in the Finder, Windows Explorer, or via clients like Transmit -- Readdle lets you access hosted storage on your MobileMe account or other WebDAV services.

Once you get the files onto your device, it's easy to view all iPhone-friendly formats, or forward documents and images by email. I'm particularly fond of the full-screen PDF and PPT viewers in the app. Of course, it's no Documents to Go, but it's a good start (and for those waiting eagerly for D2G to arrive on the iPhone, word from DataViz is that the app is on track for a Q2 release).

Update: DistortedLoop points to veteran Palm developer QuickOffice and the $9.99 Mobile Files Pro product, which offers iDisk connectivity and also allows editing of Excel files. I hadn't heard of it before and we'll definitely be checking it out for a future review.

While you can use Readdle with iDisk or any WebDAV-enabled storage service, you also get a bonus account on the Readdle servers with 512 MB of storage (yes, not much, but it's handy). Upgrades to the Readdle storage start at $5/month for 2 GB. On the other hand, if you need the cloud access but not the onboard server, you can save $2 and get Readdle's OneDisk product for $7.99. Per Michael's question in the comments, the Readdle team does have OneDisk working with JungleDisk and Amazon S3, and it should work in the same fashion with Docs.

Though box.net is focused on enterprise users, it's plenty functional for personal use; with a free 1GB storage account that permits 5 collaboration folders and files up to 25 MB in size, you've got some room to maneuver (paid plans start at $7.95/mo). The companion iPhone app, also free, lets you upload images from your photo library or camera, view a list of recently modified files, and open up any of your files for viewing (unfortunately the new box.net webdoc format reads in as raw HTML, which is a drag). You can also forward sharing links to your colleagues directly from the iPhone app, which can be extremely helpful in the midst of a collaborative project.

The box.net app is more streamlined than Readdle Docs, but offers a lot less of the bidirectional functionality, and the viewer isn't fullscreen or landscape enabled; it also doesn't appear to cache large documents locally as Readdle does, and it's crashed on me once or twice while downloading large PDFs. Still, if you're already using box.net or you don't have a WebDAV-enabled storage option for use with Readdle, it's a fine app to try.

Details of the two new kids on the block, in the 2nd half of the post.

The Boy Genius Report has reported on the latest cloud storage solution to grace the Mac world. Syncplicity, which currently exists for Windows, has opened up its beta version for the Mac.

Syncplicity, free for 2GB of storage and syncing between two computers and $9.99 a month ($99 a year) USD for syncing among an unlimited number of computers and 50GB of storage, mirrors any folder on your system with its online sibling in the "cloud." Unlike MobileMe, where items to be synced must be contained within your iDisk, any folder on your hard drive can be synced by right-clicking it and selecting it from a menu -- really nice if you need to get a subfolder of a subfolder online. As soon as that folder is updated, so is the remote one.

Another touted feature is the ability to access those folders from a browser on any computer, including your cell phone.

The Syncplicity beta is an Intel-only program and requires OSX 10.5.

Syncplicity joins a crowded field that just doesn't include MobileMe: Zumodrive, Dropbox and SugarSync are out there as well, all willing to do battle for customers who are growing increasingly dissatisfied with Apple's offering to the point that they are considering alternatives.

Have you tried out the private beta for Syncplicity? What other cloud storage solution do you use? Let us know in the comments! Meanwhile, we'll start looking at Syncplicity on our end and present you with a full look at the beta in the next few days.

Many commenters and bloggers hither and yon have noticed that MobileMe lacks "true push" capabilities, even though Apple uses the "push" buzzword extensively to describe MobileMe services.

A commenter in a MacRumors thread about the subject took screenshots from Apple's site, showing they had removed the phrase "Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously." In its place, Apple clarifies that changes from the iPhone and web apps are updated instantly on connected computers, but not vice versa.

Apple also notes in a Knowledge Base article that changes "made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe 'cloud' once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11)."

That, to me, doesn't sound like "push," it sounds like "sync." The term "push" still applies, however, to me.com email, as that shows up immediately (in my experience, at least.) Calendars and contacts, though, not so much, apparently.

[Via BetaNews.]

Two of my preferred Mac-friendly cloud services have now made the jump to actually accepting money from subscribers, which is a good thing (really, it is!). TUAW favorite Evernote has moved from private to public beta, and Techsmith video hosting site Screencast.com is now at 1.0 release status. Both services are now offering trial/free plans alongside their premium plans for paid subscribers.

The Screencast.com site is already integrated with the free Jing Project capture tool for Mac and the pro-level (and, at least for the moment, Windows-only) Camtasia Studio app; you can also upload screencasts that you create with almost any tool you like (including ADA multi-winner Screenflow) in a variety of formats for hosting on the service. Selecting which of your screencasts to share and which to password-protect is very easy, and the service automatically sets up RSS and iTunes feeds for the folders you choose to make public.The 60-day trial account includes 200 MB of storage and a 1GB transfer limit; paid plans start at $6.95 a month.

Evernote's private beta grew to include over 125,000 users (ahem), and the new public beta includes an option for a $5/month premium user plan that increases your monthly transfer quota/new note cap from 40 MB to 500 megabytes and gives you SSL for all data, priority access to the text-recognition queues and tier 1 customer support. Plus you get a snazzy t-shirt while supplies last (pink elephants on parade!). The web interface to Evernote has also gotten a facelift, with full drag-and-drop support and an improved clipper feature. Can't say yet if they've fixed the session timeout issue that ate a long note my wife was writing last night, but I surely hope so.

In a conversation a couple of weeks back, Evernote CEO Phil Libin shared some future directions for the product with us as well as a couple of tips from his personal use of Evernote.

First, what many are waiting for will be coming very soon: a native iPhone client for Evernote (shipping shortly after the App Store opens), including one-button publishing to Evernote and location tagging for every item you create from your phone, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading you back to that favorite restaurant or bargain spot. (Phil's tip: whenever he parks his car at the airport, he takes a picture of the parking spot and sends it to Evernote to help jog his jetlagged brain.)

Second, the upcoming platform-wide features for Evernote will soon include more granular controls on publishing and sharing, a revamped Windows client, Evernote for Blackberry, and audio notes. (Phil's tip: he uses Evernote notebooks to share collections of photos or screenshots, like this accidental poetry from CNN rundown.) Later this summer we should expect to see the first public release of the Evernote API, which will permit third-party devs to add features to the service (personally I'd love to have a business card postprocessor tool, which Libin sees as a good 3rd party opportunity).

Other future features are yet to be publicly disclosed, but Libin hinted that the image-processing power of Evernote's servers may be bent to teasing out specific features of photographs. Faces? Product barcodes? Geotagged landscapes? Can't wait to find out. Meanwhile, the free Mac version of Evernote (read Brett's original review here) is downloadable at evernote.com.

The cloud storage and sync offering from Sharpcast, SugarSync, has released a public beta of its OS X client today, complementing the existing Windows, web and mobile (WinMo + Blackberry, iPhone coming soon) clients. The Mac client and the Windows client appear pretty much the same, but once you set up your sync you don't have to look at the client UI very often.

SugarSync is a for-pay service that extends your local files seamlessly to your other computers, to a secure webpage, and pretty much to anywhere you think they ought to go. CEO Gibu Thomas describes SugarSync as "get my stuff everywhere," a supercharged and cross-platform version of .Mac iDisk synchronization. Our colleagues at Download Squad have checked out the service in detail, and there's a good writeup at webware.com as well.

To use SugarSync, you can define a set of folders to sync, photos to share, "Magic Briefcase" files that live in the cloud and sync down on demand, click and go -- then the defined content will be available on all your computers. With both "full sync" and "light sync" modes, you can leave rarely used files on the SugarSync side and only retrieve them as needed (great for those MacBook Air users hungry for storage). You can also selectively share photo galleries or other content via the web UI.

Once you get past the 45-day, 10 GB of storage trial period, you can use the discount available through 4/15 to get a half- off data plan (starts at $25/yr for 10 GB, up to 250 GB for $250/yr).The advantages of SugarSync for backup, specificity of synced items, and a supported client may make you give it a look as an alternative to iDisk, or to cloud solutions like OmniDrive, JungleDisk or other clients for Amazon's S3 that require you to roll your own synchronization plan.