Back in January, BlueStacks was introduced to MUO readers in an article that provides similar alternatives to the emulation software. Since then, the development of BlueStacks has progressed in a way that, in my opinion, blows the other two right out of the water. BlueStacks has officially joined my circle of “holy grail” software like Dropbox and Steam.

If you’ve never used BlueStacks before, it’s a way to bring the Android platform to you right from your desktop or laptop. It works with both Windows and Mac, too. There are so many useful and unique ways to use BlueStacks to your advantage that I’d like to give it a proper introduction to our readers and hopefully have you guys experiencing an OS like never before.

BlueStacks

While BlueStacks doesn’t emulate the entire Android experience, it’s easily the best and smoothest solution to running Android apps from your computer. The most awesome feature of the BlueStacks software is cloud connectivity. This means you can actually sync your Android phone with BlueStacks to immediately carry over apps, updates, photos, text messages, and more. There are a lot of ways to remotely access phones on Android and iOS, but none of those experiences are as fluid as syncing to BlueStacks.

This feature opens up a lot of things that you and I could get into. Work at your PC but not interested in always checking your phone for text messages? Text from your desktop. It’s faster anyway.

BlueStacks is extremely sleek and easy to learn to use. The My Apps page is the equivalent of a home screen. It looks like this:

Everything is as simple as pointing and clicking. Mouse gestures like clicking and dragging down or swiping are fluid in emulating finger gestures on your touchscreen. BlueStacks’ settings menu will also allow you to customize certain options that aren’t as comfortable when translating from a touchscreen phone to your desktop.

For example, automated capitalization and word correction? Don’t need that at a keyboard. Thankfully, that stuff can be switched off. But how do apps actually look on BlueStacks? That’s what it’s good for after all! They’re beautiful, if you ask me. Some come in sizes native to Android phones, like Instagram:

Others, like Evernote, will be able to stretch and fit the screen:

And who could forget about Android games? When I first heard about this Android app emulator, that was my immediate reaction. Along with that, I had to assume that games would skip, lag, and respond terribly. That isn’t the case at all. Everything is incredibly smooth. You can even enjoy MMOs on BlueStacks. Here I am playing Warspear Online:

I had originally checked out BlueStacks just to get a feel for Android. I’m an iOS guy and I’ve actually never played with the Android platform. What I got out of this software is a whole new realm of games and neat software that I’ll eventually even be able to sync to a device if I do choose to pick up an Android phone. Awesome stuff.

What do you guys think of BlueStacks and what it does for the Android platform? Let me know in the comments.