Remote Desktop Apps

Splashtop is my personal favorite out of all the apps we will be seeing today. Mainly because it offers great fluidity for browsing through your operating system and auto adjusts the resolution for your iPad's display. I tried this on my MacBook Pro and iPad 2 and OS X felt really natural to the iPad. I tried this with a few people and they thought it looked like a port of OS X to work on the iPad. Splashtop looks amazing, is really easy to set up, and easy to connect.

LogMeIn offers somewhat smooth performance, but you won't be able to push out some 1080p videos via your iTunes library. But just for the normal stuff, LogMeIn does a great job. You also get a pretty awesome file browser, so you don't even need to navigate to get those files. Overall, LogMeIn does a great job covering for you at work if you forgot those documents on your home computer! You will need a subscription, which is only free for two weeks.

Screens VNC is an awesome way to easily connect to your Mac or PC. It includes iCloud integration so that all of your iCloud devices can be connected. Screens VNC has awesome gesture-based controls which once learned, become quite natural to use. Screens is a universal download and is, in my opinion, the best VNC application on the App Store.

I have used TeamViewer for a while in my personal life. TeamViewer offers decent performance for a free app. It lags a little and has a slight delay in movement. Overall though, TeamViewer is a great remote desktop app for iPhone and iPad.

Welcome to LogMeIn's big brother. So why do we rank it lower than its little sibling? One thing makes you think twice about the full-featured version of LogMeIn: the price. LogMeIn Ignition comes in at one cent short of a hundred dollars. I'll let you read that again… Yes! 100 bucks for a remote desktop app! Granted, you can play HD videos and play games through it but we feel the price tag is a little high.

iSSH is a little tricky to set up, but Zinger-Soft offers some good support documents to help you out. iSSH offers a complete suite of protocols you can use to connect to your Mac, PC or Linux computer, including x11, ssh, telnet, raw, VNC and RDP. A universal app, iSSH offers great versatility and is available at a comparatively low price.

Jump desktop is a VNC type remote desktop connection app for the iPad. This means you can connect really easily to your Mac (PC needs a little more work) and it requires no additional software. Jump offers good stability and average performance with only a slight lag being shown on my test.

VNC Viewer is a great way to connect to your Mac, PC or Linux machine via VNC protocol. VNC viewer supports super high resolutions (up to 5120 by 2400) and works great, there is a very low latency which is expected. VNC Viewer is a $10 universal download and works with the free VNC server software or Mac OS X's own screen sharing feature.

From the same company that brings us IM pro, RDM+ is a really good and well built application. You can control multiple monitors, use on multiple operating systems, and take advantage of an array of features that RDM+ has to offer, all at a reasonable price.

iTeleport is a another VNC based app, so if you are running Windows, you will need some software. Mac users just need to enable screen sharing. The app works well overall but feels a little more jumpy than the others over 3G. iTeleport is certainly a decent app but we feel you can get more value for your hard earned dollar with the other apps in this guide.