Earlier this year, a startup called BlueStacks announced that it was developing a native x86 Android runtime for the Windows operating system. The company finally released the product for public alpha testing this morning. As BlueStacks promised, the software allows users to run Android mobile applications on a Windows computer without compromising performance.

Although the software still has the kind of rough edges that one would expect from an alpha release, it represents an impressive technical feat and could offer value in a number of different contexts. We tried out the BlueStacks Android Player ourselves and tested it with several different Android applications.

I installed the Android Player on an HP desktop computer with a six-core Intel i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM. During my initial attempt to set up the software, the installer reported failure and terminated. It installed successfully without any problems on my second attempt.

The installer placed a gadget on the desktop that depicts the Android robot mascot standing on the Windows logo. When the gadget is clicked, it pops up a menu that provides access to various Android applications and other BlueStacks functionality. The application icons are organized in a three-by-three grid displayed on pages that you can flip through by clicking right- and left-arrow icons.

When you click on an Android application, it will launch in a full-screen window that covers your desktop, including the Windows task bar. The Android notification area is displayed at the top of the screen and can be dragged down to show the conventional Android notification panel.

A special bar at the bottom of the screen shows several persistent controls, including Android's standard back and menu buttons, a close button for terminating the application, a button to switch screen orientation, and a button to toggle whether the application should be stretched to fill the screen.

At the current time, there doesn't appear to be a way to run an Android application in a window alongside other windows. You can, however, use the standard Windows alt-tab keyboard shortcut to switch between the running Android application and other open windows on the computer. You can only actively run one Android application at a time—but the BlueStacks player will preserve application state to the same extent supported by the Android platform, so you don't lose your place if you switch between applications.

By default, the Android Player comes with a handful of popular Android programs that are known to work well in the runtime. This includes the Pulse news reader and games like Bebbled and Alchemy. The applications worked as expected and ran at native speeds.

The tool that Google includes with the Android SDK for testing Android applications on desktop computers is extremely slow because it's an ARM emulator. As we explained in our initial coverage of BlueStacks, the company's Android Player doesn't suffer from those performance problems because it's a fully native x86 port of the Android runtime and Dalvik bytecode interpreter.

The BlueStacks player could be extremely useful for third-party application developers who want to test their Android applications on Windows without the overhead of ARM emulation or the complexity of having to run a full x86 port of Android via tools like VirtualBox. The BlueStacks player could also be useful on Windows-based touchscreen devices.

In the interest of science, I installed the Splashtop streamer on the Windows 7 computer where I was running the Android Player and then connected to it from an iPad. This allowed me to run Android applications in full-screen on the Apple tablet. Kinetic scrolling and a number of other touch interactions in the Android applications worked well through this setup. The prospect of being able to natively install the Android player on one of the upcoming x86-based Windows 8 tablets seems particularly compelling.

Alongside the new player, BlueStacks has also released an Android application called Cloud Connect that allows users to transmit Android applications from their phone to a Windows PC. This application syncing mechanism worked effectively during our tests. There is also a "Get More Apps" icon in the BlueStacks launcher on Windows that will open the company's Web-based app store in a browser.

Users or third-party application developers who want to install arbitrary APK packages can use an experimental tool called HD-ApkHandler.exe that is located in the BlueStacks subdirectory of the Program Files path on the filesystem. If you drag and drop an APK file onto the executable, it will be installed in the Android Player and show up in the desktop launcher.

The BlueStacks Android Player alpha can be downloaded for free from the company's website. It currently limits the user to installing 36 total applications. A "Pro" version without the application cap will be available at some point in the future.