Parallels 8 released in India for Rs 3,999

Parallels has launched the version 8 of its award winning Mac virtualization software in India for Rs 3,999.
Parallels is the software Mac users use to run Windows and Mac applications simultaneously without the need of booting into a different OS altogether. But the big deal with Parallels 8 is that it has been built keeping Windows 8 and the MacBook Pro Retina display in mind. While it was possible to run Windows 8 via the previous version of Parallels, it was not optimized for the Retina Display, which in turn resulted in a very pixilated UI.
Some of the key features of the new version of Parallels 8 include integration of voice dictation introduced in OS X Mountain Lion inside Windows 8, and a mode where a website automatically opens in Internet Explorer instead of Safari if it does not render well on it. This of course is a very minor feature because most websites indeed do scale well on Safari, apart from some Microsoft sites using ‘Silverlight’.
One can even drag and drop from the Windows Desktop to the OS X dock and it can also share bluetooth connections across both OSs. Integration with OS X Mountain Lion has been scaled up to a new level as both Windows 8 and OS X Mountain Lion get consolidated in the OS X notifications and one can even use OS X gestures in Windows 8, and that is something one cannot do while using Windows 8 via Bootcamp.
Parallels 7 already provided very slick performance with the immensely light Windows 8 OS, but Parallels 8 improves it further. The company claims that performance is up to 30 percent faster for input/output (I/O) operations, 30 percent faster for games and up to 25 percent faster for virtual machine operations such as boot, suspend, shutdown and resume, when compared to Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac.