App Player
BlueStacks App Player lets you run your Android apps fast and full screen on Windows PCs and tablets.
Alpha testing recently ended, but you can sign up to be a beta tester. Join people in more than 100 countries who are using BlueStacks to run apps like Pulse, Advanced Task Killer and Alchemy full screen.
We’re always working to improve so let us know any suggestions you have that could make BlueStacks better.
I love this app, I hope I can use the webcam on laptop as the camera in bluestacks
Bluestacks is great.
I run it on my HTPC and it will sync all my Android apps from the play store, so it's like two for one. It can also be great if you want to buy an app but your phone/tablet won't run/download it from the play store. Great to keep the kids away from my phone a little, and there are lots of games/apps that work well (or better) on the big screen. It can even use a web-cam, as I was surprised to find out!
AMD are offering apps packaged with Bluestacks for download from their website, and this will possibly be a way of continuing to use it free once it comes out of beta. I think it will possibly remain free for those with an AMD processor or ATI video card.
Annoyances include
Can't do multi-touch (only one mouse pointer). Some games/apps even struggle with single touch, but most are fine. Sometimes when using apps the mouse pointer has moved off the bottom of the screen and you lose control until you move it back inside the virtual screen border.
Has a dodgy 'desktop'/overlay that is nothing like a normal Android home screen, so I downloaded an alternative desktop from the play store and it's like a big tablet now. There's an app to configure how apps use the screen real estate and it seems to work 99% of the time - I've only had trouble with one app from memory.
I also deleted a whole lot of the built in bloatware that comes with it - no need to root to do that as it was dead simple after installing the alternative desktop. I think I remember seeing a discussion on how to root it on xda but the only thing I can think that would make that worth it is ad blocking. You can push stuff using ADB I think, which is almost as good as having it rooted, so perhaps rooting isn't necessary - I haven't tried this but I know it runs an ADB app in the background.
Doesn't do calendar, mail or contacts sync out of the box. I'm sure someone on xda has that figured out. Perhaps the new play store downloadable google calendar app will help?
A bar that you can't get rid of on the right that suggests new apps to install and which my kids keep clicking on.
It seems to be a real system hog and leaves stuff running in the background, so on my Core2Duo HTPC XBMC will sometimes run like a real dog after running Bluestacks and requires running the Task Manager (CTRL-Shift-ESC) to kill the bluestacks process (can also kill the ADB process) before the XBMC framerate gets back to normal.
I've had trouble setting up my phone and bluestacks to both use two factor authentication to share my google account. There is an explanation of how to do it on the google web site, but in my one quick attempt it seemed to be nowhere near as straight forward as the simple explanation offered. You are meant to be able to authenticate your device once and set it as trusted from then on - I thought it was working and then after restarting the PC it complains that it can't login, while my phone is OK. The easy solution is to remove two factor authentication, but that's a backwards step.
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This app is great