Look at your iPad. Now look at your desktop PC. Now back to the iPad, now back to the PC. Sadly, your iPad doesn’t run Windows 7. But with Parallels Mobile, it could run it indirectly via VNC.

Look again. Your virtual machines are now diamonds.

The new Parallels Mobile app for iOS devices lets you control your Parallels 6 environment from the comfort and safety of your iOS device. If you’re not familiar with Parallels, it’s a virtual environment in which you can run Windows on your Mac, whether because you need it for work or school, or because you just love it so much. Parallels doesn’t judge, and neither do I. The desktop app costs $80; the mobile app is free.

The latest development is this iOS app, which lets you tunnel into the Parallels environment you’ve got running on your Mac and manipulate it the same way another VNC client would manipulate the native OS. I suppose you could use a regular VNC client this way (in fact, it’s been done before), but the Parallels mobile app does all the configuring for you, and you’re directly manipulating the virtual machine, not doing it through an extra layer of OS.

I’ll definitely be testing this out a little later — if I can find my Windows install disc. I want to try running an N64 emulator in Windows, in OS X, on my iPad. Any deeper than that and I run the risk of going into limbo.

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