The latest thing to appear from Intel at CES 2010 is the AppUp Center: an app store designed specifically for netbooks with an Intel Atom processor on the inside. The AppUp Center, which is available now in its beta stages, will be bundled with new Atom netbooks from Asus, Acer and Samsung and also available for the public to download for either Windows or Linux. Intel has been working with over 3,000 developers to make this happen, so we decided to load it up and give it a try.
Downloading and installing the AppUp Center was extremely easy, both on our Lenovo S9 netbook with an Intel Atom N270 and (for testing purposes) our full-blown desktop with an Intel Core 2 Quad on the inside. Upon opening the application we noticed it took up the entire screen very snugly on the S9 thanks to the store being designed for netbooks with 1024×600 resolutions.
Unfortunately, on our Core 2 Quad machine it didn’t like our 1680×1050 screen resolution at all as you can see below, and there wasn’t any apparent way we could make it full screen, or shift it around the screen. However this shouldn’t be a problem for standard netbook users.
The next most obvious thing to do was to create an account – this is how you’re going to download your apps. After filling in details and putting in a credit card number the app store is fully accessible to download. It was odd, though, that you had to create account in your web browser, rather than a sign-up form being built into the actual app.
Finding apps is very simple. You have a search bar up the top on the main page, and down the bottom are the staff picks, hot apps and new releases in case you can’t decide. If you’re just using the app to browse, you can click on the categories on the side (of which there are nine) and scroll through the apps. There aren’t many apps listed as of right now, mainly because the AppUp Center is very new, but we expect it to grow.
Downloading apps is also simple. Once you find an app, you just click on it and it brings you to the info page for the app. The info page is quite comprehensive, showing a detailed description, screenshots, user reviews and ratings, app size, license, release date, and pretty much everything else you can think of. We did find that sometimes application info and images took a while to load, and it had nothing to do with our internet connection.
Once you have downloaded the application, it installs it to your Program Files folder for easy access outside the AppUp Center, but it also puts it into the My Apps section of the AppUp Center so you can launch it from inside the Center. Here, you can also cancel recently made transactions and view/download updates for apps when they become available.
However, there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to using the AppUp Center over a simple Google search in your browser and downloading it that way. It does do a nice job of cataloguing what apps you have installed through the Center, and has a nice feature to download highly rated and new apps, but for downloading an app that you know you want there doesn’t seem to be any reason why you would use the Center.
Luckily though the AppUp Center is still in beta stages and we hope that Intel can add some improvements to make it a truly worthwhile experience. Maybe adding some exclusive, AppUp Cetner only applications would add to the experience. It would also be nice to see the AppUp Center available in more countries than just the USA and Canada; it made it hard for us down here in Australia to sign-up.
If you feel like giving Intel’s AppUp Center a go on your netbook, you can download it from Intel’s website now.
