April 4, 2014

SLGo now $9.95/month for unlimited use

The #1 complaint about SLGo from beta testers and those just looking at what it offers was the pricing! $2.50/hour was not happening. Soooo, on their blog yesterday, OnLive announced a new pricing model with a monthly rate of $9.95 for unlimited use and a $1.00/hour pay-as-you-go. OnLive also expanded the service to additional countries.

This is the right direction for SLGo and I congratulate Linden Lab and OnLive for listening and responding to the initial criticisms. Under the Rod Humble regime, I suspect we might have seen both companies doggedly sticking to the $2.50/hour rate while the service floundered. 

For those wanting the full Second Life experience on their Android tablets, SLGo is a good option...actually the only option right now. SLGo basically ports Second Life and the standard SL Viewer interface onto the Android platform via streaming from OnLive's own servers. SLGo is not going to work with Android phones -- the screen space is too limited. (Contrast this to the Lumiya Android App -- a standalone mobile viewer that connects directly to Linden Lab's Second Life servers and works with both phones and tablets for a one-time purchase of $2.99 in the Google Play store.)

SLGo delivers very good 3D rendering speed and you "see" the SL world the same as you would using a desktop PC and a standard Viewer. The #1 complaint is that the SL Viewer itself is still too complex even for the expanded real estate offered by tablets. When you want to type something (ie. IM or chat), the virtual keyboard covers critical areas of the scene and viewer and gets in the way of normal interaction with Second Life. I'd think if you were serious about using SLGo regularly, an external keyboard might be a good idea.

Lumiya, on the other hand, with its stripped down "designed-for-mobile" interface, does a much better job with communication activities and simple interaction with the Second Life grid. The downside is lower detail levels and frame rates.

Anyway, official stuffs below:


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