Celio REDFLY Mobile Companion
CES 2008 Coverage

The Palm Foleo's back! No, not really. But the REDFLY Mobile Companion from Celio, which will be shown at this year's CES, may be the closest thing to Palm's sub-laptop to actually hit the market.

The REDFLY looks like a subnotebook, but it's really just a peripheral: a big screen, keyboard, and touchpad that attach to your smartphone, so you can do office work without squinting and thumb-typing. A special driver that you load onto Windows Mobile 5 or 6 handhelds lets you take advantage of the REDFLY's 800-by-480 screen, keyboard, and touchpad to essentially remote control your smartphone.

"We're extending the platform for the smartphone and providing a device which improves the deficiencies that we have with the smartphone, namely looking at 2-inch screens and having to thumb-type," said Kirt Bailey, Celio's CEO.

The REDFLY is 6.0 by 9.0 by 1.0 inches and weighs 1.9 pounds—a similar size and weight to the ASUS Eee PC 4G, which is 6.5 by 8.8 by 0.9 inches and 2 pounds. It hooks up to a smartphone via USB or Bluetooth. Since it has no CPU or storage of its own, it has very long battery life—8 hours, according to the manufacturer. Its two USB ports are compatible with flash drives, and it also has a VGA out for projectors and larger monitors. You store all your data and run all your programs on your smartphone, not on the REDFLY. It's just a screen and a keyboard.

The REDFLY's driver software lets you play tricks to maximize the 800-by-480 screen. For instance, you can show extra rows and columns in a Pocket Excel spreadsheet, or show Web pages at full width without scrolling. REDFLY's demo images show the screen with a Today screen, calendar summary and free-time chart all up at once. But the REDFLY isn't a video miracle worker—videos appear in a little 320-by-240 window on the device.

"If you're on one to three day trips, you'll take this device" instead of a laptop, Bailey said.

The REDFLY sounds compelling, but it's got two potential problems. One is Celio's fault. The other isn't.

First: It's $500. Considering that full-fledged, low-end notebooks, like the ASUS Eee PC, are now priced at under $500, it's hard to justify that price for something that doesn't have a processor, memory or storage. Bailey responded by saying Celio will have an "enterprise focus," which is English for "businesses are less price sensitive than consumers."

The "enterprise focus" also helps Celio play up one of their greatest strengths, security. The REDFLY is truly dumb, so if you lose it, you're not compromising your data. There's no data in it to lose.

My other problem is that Windows Mobile office applications don't work well enough to justify the big screen and keyboard. With a full-sized device, you're going to want some semblance of the desktop experience. The stripped-down Office Mobile and especially the barely functional Internet Explorer Mobile, on big screens and keyboards, will just leave you missing desktop-standard features like styles, tracking changes, and Flash support.

Bailey countered by pointing out that as Windows Mobile applications improve, the REDFLY will reflect those improvements (as it runs no apps of its own), and that there are various aspects of Windows Mobile—like the ability to attach a note to practically any PIM item—that become much more usable with the REDFLY.

"We are giving people a very efficient, effective way to keep their data on one platform, and have a better experience accessing it," Bailey said.

We'll have hands-on photos of the REDFLY in our CES Photo Blog. The device will go on sale in March for $499.

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