Welcome to our weekly digest! Happy Thanksgiving! Lets recap what was in the news recently.

Jolla Tablet — world's first crowd-sourced tablet. Jolla's Indiegogo campaign exceed everyone expectations. They tripled their original $380,000 goal in a few days. Jolla team has announced that it’s adding new campaign goals including the option of built-in 3.5G data capability. The device will come with its own operating system, Sailfish OS. Sailfish OS has user interface controlled solely by touch and gestures. Besides running its own native apps, Sailfish OS allows to install and run Android apps.


Google has released improved the security features in Google for Work. In The Devices and Activity dashboard you can find information about the devices accessing your Google account, including devices that were active in the last 28 days as well as those which are currently signed in. This is a welcome addition as it allows users to proactively manage security of their account.

European Parliament votes to ask for Google to be broken up. The measure passed by a symbolic vote and does not carry any legal weight, but it highlights that the search giant with 90 percent marketshare for search in Europe is under close attention from regulating authorities. But experts believe that Google won’t be broken up and lay some reasons why.

Today is the Black Friday! Check out #blackfridaydeals on Twitter to find discounts for apps and gadgets. You also may want to take a look at the best deals iOS and Mac apps and games.

As always, find us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Welcome to our weekly news digest!

Early in the week the New York City Department of Education approved Google Apps for Education as a supported tool for their schools. With this it is expected that another million plus students, across 1,800 schools would start using Chromebooks and related Google services.

If you are on the market for a new inexpensive laptop, you definitely should take a look at Chromebooks. There is a great review on the Verge, which will help you navigate the world modern-generation devices powered by Chrome OS.

Long time there was no news from Nokia. But this week they surprised us. Nokia came out with it's first tablet based on Android – Nokia N1. This 7.9-inch device comes Android 5.0 Lollipop that runs Nokia's new Z Launcher (you can also try it on other Android devices too). Check out the reviews that compare Nokia's tablet with other popular browsers: Nexus 9 by HTC or iPad mini from Apple. Some say Nokia N1 is nice alternative to current Android tablets, others say it closely resembles Apple's iPad Mini (some even say too closely). It still remains to be seen how well the new device will perform on the market.

Microsoft announced Sway – a new application that allows to easily create and share a polished, interactive, web-based canvas of your ideas with family, friends, teachers, and coworkers. "Sway shows you the stuff you have stored in the cloud: just tap or click, drag, and drop it right onto your canvas", – they say in the announcement. The app will allow to add content from OneDrive, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and your device. Currently it is available by invitation only.

Google released Chrome 39 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This release is an important milestone for Mac users as it finally brings 64-bit build of the browser to this platform. As usually, new release packs lots of security fixes, a number of new apps/extension APIs, and lots of under the hood changes for stability and performance. Also, Chrome 39 brings a slew of new features for developers.

Mozilla makes Yahoo the default Firefox search engine in the U.S. In Russia it uses Yandex, and Baidu in China. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, eBay, Amazon, Twitter and Wikipedia will continue to be built-in as alternative search engine options. Google has been the Firefox global search default since 2004, and Google will continue to power the Safe Browsing and Geolocation features in Firefox.

Stay tuned! Follow us in Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

At rollApp we constantly working to extend the collection of apps available to you in our cloud. And we also try to bring them closer to you to make it easier to be more productive with the applications you need where you need them. Today we want to let you know about some of the new apps available in the Chrome Web Store.

The first app to start with is FBReader. This is an e-book reader which supports popular e-book formats like ePub, fb2, mobi, html, and plain text. rollApp allows you to run FBReader without installation on many devices. With that you can build you digital library in the cloud on Dropbox or Google Drive, or simply open individual e-book and enjoy your reading.

Last week we mentioned Brackets – open-source text editor for web developers. We made Brackets available on rollApp, so you can now use this app from any device with just a web browser:

Last week Microsoft made available its famous Office suite on iPads, iPhones and Android phones for free. There is always a high demand for quality office productivity applications on any platform. No wonder that LibreOffice and OpenOffice in the cloud are by far the most popular applications in our catalog. With free Microsoft Office applications entering the playground it useful to check how different office solutions for mobile devices compare against one another.

We tried Microsoft Office on iPad and Android phone and here is what we think about our experience.

First things first — when you start an app you see a login screen. Here you have to login with your Microsoft account. While this can be natural for long time Microsoft users, not all of the iPad users have Microsoft accounts, so they’ll have to create new account to use the app. At the same time to work with rollApp applications you can login with your existing Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter or Amazon account. Chances are high that you have at least one of those. Also, you can “test drive” any application without login to get a grasp of functionality and features.


While asking to login may seem unfortunate it is the only way to give users ability to securely access their files, which very often do not originate from the mobile device where the application is launched. On both iPad and Android Microsoft Office allows you to get files from OneDrive and Dropbox cloud storage. In addition to that on iPad you can work with local files, which you get to and from the device via the iTunes, when it is connected to your laptop or desktop computer. Applications on rollApp offer wider range of supported cloud storage: you can store your documents on Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and Yandex.Disk. And more options are coming in the future.

Mobile version of Microsoft Office, naturally, offers best possible compatibility with file formats of older brother — Microsoft Office for desktop. What may come as a surprise is that mobile version only supports basic editing and formatting, while more advanced features are not there at all or require a premium subscription. For instance, things like changing page orientation or inserting WordArt in Word, or customization of pivot tables and adding chart elements in Excel are premium features available only to Office 365 subscribers. Overall, the mobile version of Microsoft Office is underpowered comparing to its desktop ancestor. On the other hand, LibreOffice and OpenOffice on rollApp are full-featured applications that bring all the power and advanced features of the desktop office suite right at the hands of mobile users. They have familiar interface and with rollApp are available in their full glory on any device and platform: Chromebook, iPad, Android tablet or phone, or Kindle Fire. We do our best to make more friendly and natural for mobile users with features like virtual mouse.


Pricing is also an important part. Microsoft Office for mobile is available for free in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, but offers only a limited functionality. Premium subscription to Office for $6.99 per month will unlock premium features in mobile office and also give you license to use office applications on your PC and 1 terabyte of OneDrive storage.

With rollApp you get all the applications functions including advanced for free with ad-supported account, which gives access to more than 100 apps with no limitations. rollApp premium subscription (also $6.99 per month) gives you ad-free access to apps and extended platform features. For example, your application will be running on the server for 1 hour (instead of 10 minutes in the free version), when you intentionally or unintentionally disconnect from it.

All in all, Microsoft has released a great application with slick design and great functionality for premium users. The free version is fairly limited, but includes the most necessary functions for mobile users. Office applications on rollApp would work better for users who need power without compromises and value the ability to use the same full-featured applications on wide variety of platforms.

Anyway, more choice is always better for the users and we hope this overview will help you choose what’s best for you. Also, we will highly appreciate your suggestions and ideas on how to make rollApp more useful. You can share them with us in Twitter, Facebook and Google+. 

Welcome to our digest. Let's look together at the events and news of this week.

One of the most awaited news of this week is release of first devices with Android 5.0 Lollipop. Unfortunately, Nexus 9 is the only device available to try new Material design live. The device, naturally, prompted a lot of reviews of the new Nexus and surprisingly or not the opinions are very mixed. You can get all you need to know from detailed reviews from TechCrunch, The Verge or Mashable. Also, we highly recommend review of the reviews by one of reddit users ;-)

Adobe Brackets – open-source editor for web developers – hits 1.0 release. The team has added awesome stuff in this release: multiple cursors, split view, theme support, and many more fixes and enhancements. There is already a vibrant community around Brackets, which built and continues to build useful extensions and themes to boost your productivity with the editor. One of the cool features, which sets Brackets apart from the rest of text editor crowd, is side-by-side live preview of changes in you make in the code.

Google released Application Launcher for Drive that allows to open files from your Google Drive using applications installed on your computer. After installing the extension when you right-click on a file, select "Open with" option to see a list of compatible applications to open the file.

Mozilla and GSMA team up to help developing localized, cultural context-aware, non-English content for the Web. With more low-price smartphones, such as the handsets powered by Mozilla's Firefox OS, this would make Web more reachable for the next 4 billion people, who currently do not have access to the Internet. Initial field tests in Bangladesh, Kenya, Brazil and India are currently underway.

As you know, rollApp is all about working with different applications on different devices and we have been pushing this idea for quite a time already. It is always great to see others embrace this idea as well. The other day Microsoft Announced RemoteIE, which allows to run Internet Explorer on Android, iOS and Mac OS X. That's good news for developers because they can now quickly spin up the latest Internet Explorer builds for testing regardless of their operating system or development environment. You can try the service right now here.

Also, this week winners of the The Tabby Awards /Business were announced. Check out some of the best business applications for tablets in this rating.

Enjoy your reading. Have a nice week-end and keep in touch!