I’ve been using Desktop Connect for a bit and wanted to share my experiences.

First I did a speed test with my iPad. I called Singtel up yesterday and asked to have my 1Mbps data plan switched to the iPad data plan that’s supposedly 7.2Mbps. Maybe it hasn’t taken effect yet.

This is the screen shot of my usage prior to the remote session. I have turned off WiFi by the way.

So when you launch Desktop Connect (or Easy Connect I’m not really sure what the name is cause it’s listed Desktop Connect in the app store) I can see the machines that I have associated with my account. You’ll need to be running an application on your host machine and sign in with the same Google ID there too.

You’ll see here I’m logged in at 19:49.

For about 7 minutes I clicked on links, scrolled around, queued up a download.

After I disconnected, this is the screen shot of my data usage.

So for the quick browsing and initializing of download, it was about 6MB down for 7 minutes. Of course, your usage will probably depend on what you do during the session. Perhaps if you brows images, or even videos, or flash animations, you’d have higher consumption than when you’re only browsing through text.

One thing I’ve discovered is that it doesn’t work well when your host has an external monitor. I was trying to access my home machine from my iPad earlier and I had left it on with the external monitor attached. I couldn’t I could see what was going on on the screen but everytime I try to click or scroll, nothing happened. I discovered when I got home that although my PC brought all windows to the primary monitor, the mouse pointer was still on the other screen . So, remember to disconnect external monitors before you go out in order to let it function properly.

Another thing, if you’re using Win7 on your host machine, right clicking (there’s a button to toggle click mode to right or left click) to get the jumplist works on the host machine (since you can see the screen simultaneously on the host and ipad) but it doesn’t seem to render on the iPad. Strange.

Some folks have asked whether the multitouch functionality for Win7 works. Answer is no, the app actually maps out the mt gestures of the ipad for things like showing the toolbars, alt+tabbing. two-finger scroll works though not very well. No matter how small I make the movement, the window always seems to scroll all the way to the end.

All in all, I think it’s good enough to at least send some files from home that I’ve forgotten or set up a folder to sync with Windows Live Sync so I can access more files from anywhere, etc.