Review: My Active Desktop

An expensive online home for your bookmarks and calendar entries

At first, we could see a target audience of people who travelled a lot but would need access to specific links and a calendar wherever they where. In practice, however, we weren't impressed with this application.

Once signed in, it looks and feels extremely basic. The homepage consists of three panels – Personal Links, Shared Links and Aid Memoirs. Shared links, as you’d expect, can be accessed by your friends, but they’ll need to be My Active Desktop subscribers.

Navigation is poor. Every time you select a different link or add a calendar entry it opens a new browser window, which soon results in a cluttered Desktop.

The biggest problem for My Active Desktop is that there are plenty of free alternatives available. Google’s customisable homepage service instantly springs to mind and, at its most basic, offers an add-free homepage with exactly the same features.

If you spend a little time with Google (RSS feeds, widgets and games are all available), it completely wipes out any sort of competition from My Active Desktop. Windows Live search is another website offering almost identical functions to Google's.

With these free tools readily available, £35 is a lot to pay. Worse still, it’s an annual subscription, so you’ll be shelling out a fair amount of cash over the years. Even if there was no free competition around, we’d expect to pay a one-off fee of under £10 for this sort of application.

As a result, we find it hard to recommend My Active Home to anyone – head for the free services of Google or Windows Live instead.