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Last weekend we did a big Mother's Day promotion for Splashtop Remote Desktop. Whether you got our app for your mom, or just for yourself - thank you for propelling us to the very top of the App Store business app category in more than 20 countries around the world! Our iPad app also topped the overall popularity charts in China and Taiwan, and got very close (#2 overall) in Germany and Japan!

As many of you reading this blog already know, the Splashtop Remote product family is all about getting full access to your computer content and applications from any device. And by "full access" we mean watching movies, listening to music, doing work, or playing PC and Flash games remotely.

There are lots of "PC things" that would be awesome to do from a tablet or a smartphone, but have not been possible before Splashtop Remote. The continued growth of our app shows that many more people out there can benefit from our technology. And so, stay tuned for more Splashtop apps coming soon to your mobile screen!

This week we launched a new free iPad app - Splashtop Remote Browser. With this app, iPad users can connect to their PC or Mac, and use their regular browser, such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE for a familiar web surfing experience, complete with their bookmarks, stored passwords, all of the plug-ins, etc.

I hope that most of the readers of this blog already have Splashtop Remote Desktop installed on their iOS or Android phones and tablets. So you may be wondering why we are making a new app just for browsing. Afterall, it only takes a second to open up any browser within a Remote Desktop session.

Our decision to make a new product came from an observation that there are lots of regular folk looking for better iPad browsing alternatives. Many of these people are not familiar with the concept of "remoting", and may think of the remote desktop technology as a potential headache rather than an elegant solution to their needs: easier shopping, social gaming, and watching online video.

Splashtop Remote Browser does just that. When you start the app, it connects to your computer, and opens up your default browser full screen. The rest - whether you want to shop, play, or watch - is the same as on your computer.

Have you seen the news ? Splashtop Remote Desktop is prebundled with the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer tablet. If you are getting one of those - lucky you. Not only do you get a cool Android 3.0 Honeycomb tabby powered by a dual-core Tegra™ 2 CPU from NVIDIA®, but you can remotely run your computer apps with a full version of Splashtop Remote for Android included for free!

If ASUS Santa did not visit you in the middle of April, you can still freely try Splashtop Remote Desktop on your own Android phone or tablet via the Android Market. We just made a free version available there. It is limited to 5 minute connections - good enough to play around with the app - but you probably should upgrade to the full and unlimited $4.99 version to watch movies or play your PC games remotely.

(Finishing this post on my Atrix. Got tired of waiting for iPhone 5, so now I am mostly on Android myself)

Happy April 15, everybody! If you are in the U.S, we hope your taxes have been filed. To cheer up those not getting a tax refund, we are announcing the Splashtop Tax Recovery Act and dropping the price for our marquee iPad app, Splashtop Remote Desktop, down to $1.99 until Monday.

We've had many users tells us that we should be charging $20 or more for our Remote Desktop solution, because it works so well and is the only one that does video and audio. So, we hope you help spread the word! Here are a few Tweets just to show you:

(thanks @jonrhayward, @poweley, and @PocketParalegal)

Splashtop OS is designed to work with Google Chrome web apps. One thing that may surprise you is that despite the name, many web apps can work when you are offline. To illustrate this, we installed a free Quick Note app from the Chrome Web Store. Here it is within Splashtop OS:

You can go offline, and still use this application to take notes even without a network connection. Here is what it looks like:

With Splashtop OS, apps like this are within seconds of turning on your computer. For a more complete review, read the post on our Splashtop OS forums.

If you are like many of us here at Splashtop, you may be waiting in line now to pick up your very own iPad 2. We told our management that we had to get several of them right away, because analysts are predicting that iPad 2 will claim an 80% share of the US tablet market this year, and thus will be a key platform for our Splashtop Remote product line. But, really, we just wanted to play with it over the weekend!

Whenever a new computing platform - like tablets - reaches millions of customers, new opportunities are born. It is indicative that several of the "hot" opportunities mentioned at the recent Montgomery Tech Conference involve new experiences on mobile devices, tablets surely being at the forefront. We think that we have only scratched the surface with our Splashtop Remote product, by enabling tablets to access all of your PC and Mac content and apps remotely. Many other usage models are upcoming - stay tuned!

And here is the photo of the line wrapping around the block outside of the Apple Store:

This week several of us are at the Mobile World Congress in Spain. Since a lot of our business is with the US or Asia-based computer makers, we have not had much presence in Europe - but our products have! Splashtop Remote in particular has been a top seller in many European countries, having reached top iTunes spots in the UK and Germany, among other places.

We've already talked to many journalists, bloggers, and developers at the show. One of the most striking things has been the popularity of Android phones here. I may be biased, having just attended MacWorld in San Francisco, but we got pretty used to hearing "OK, I will try it on my iPhone or iPad". But in Barcelona, we're getting "Can I try it on Android?" a lot more often. And, yes, you can, as long as you have a compatible Android 2.2 phone - Splashtop Remote is in the Android Market.

While we already do good business on iOS and Android, our vision is that Splashtop Remote should enable people to fully enjoy PC or Mac content and applications from any mobile device, whether its based on iOS, Android, Windows, or an emerging operating system like MeeGo.

There has been much speculation at MWC about what Nokia will or will not do with MeeGo. While Nokia is one of the founders of MeeGo, and has contributed a lot of open source technology, like Qt, to this platform, MeeGo goes beyond any single OEM. In fact, having released a MeeGo-based version of Splashtop OS to OEM partners, we see a lot of interest for devices other than mobile phones, such as tablets and netbooks.

One of our missions at MWC is to support our friends at Intel in promoting MeeGo for tablets. They announced, and are showing their latest MeeGo UX for tablets here. You can get a good review of that from Avram Piltch @ LAPTOP or Nicole Scott @ Netbooknews.com. In turn, we ported Splashtop Remote to MeeGo, and have been showing it together with Intel.

Here is a photo from the Intel booth, and another one of our tireless MWC trio after the Pepcom press event here in Barcelona:

Our team is back from CES in Las Vegas. And in tech, what happens in Vegas definitely does not stay in Vegas. As expected, this year’s show was all about tablets. We saw cool new tablets from the likes of Vizio and Motorola, and many tablet related technologies, like the Tegra 2 chip from NVIDIA, which promises to take multitasking and gaming to a different level on mobile devices.

For us, CES was about showing the newly announced Splashtop Remote for Android tablets and phones. We are stoked about the Best of CES award that Laptop Magazine gave to our new product, and about sharing this honor with Tegra 2 and Motorola Xoom.

Another interesting thing about CES was how many people were recording videos. We are no strangers to video interviews, but this year it seemed that just about everyone was taping demos and posting these videos online. Here is a sampling of videos about Splashtop, in case you did not get to visit us at CES:

This week many of us are heading to Las Vegas for the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show. CES has been great to us in the past, bringing us many interesting connections and awards, like the PC World "25 Most Innovative Products" and the "Best of CES" from Laptop Magazine. This year, the event is promising to be all about tablets. There are many new Android based tablets launching from the likes of Samsung and Vizio, and Windows-based tablets are supposed to be not far behind. We will be making our own announcement related to tablets at CES – can't share that with you quite yet. For the latest CES updates, or to connect with us at the show, follow us on Twitter: @splashtop.

We are beta testing Splashtop Remote desktop for Mac OS X. If you use a Mac with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), you can get to your desktop from your iPhone or iPad, and fully experience Mac OS remotely - video, sound, and all. Lukeyy19 made a great YouTube video with the Mac OS beta, launching iMovie, iTunes, and even Photoshop remotely (thanks dude!). Check out the video:

Keep in mind that this is still in beta, and not all features have been implemented yet. But we’d love to get your comments on how it is working for ya.