A smartphone packs enough computing punch that it could morph into your next computer, if you only had a way to get past the small screen and tiny keyboard.
Celio, a Salt Lake City, Utah, company, promises to help you do just that. Celio makes Redfly, a $250 netbook-like terminal that can be connected to phones. Users can then work off the larger keypad and display to check e-mail, surf the internet or connect to apps that they have on their phones.
"If you don't need to run iTunes, or do complicated spreadsheets, here's a viable alternative to a laptop," says Colin Kelly, marketing manager for Celio. "Redfly is for those people who just want a smartphone but are looking for a better way to type faster while making fewer mistakes."
Celio released its first Redfly terminal -- the company prefers to call it a "mobile companion" -- about 18 months ago. The first version only worked with smartphones that run Windows Mobile. Now it has a version available for BlackBerry phones.
It's an interesting idea and one that we have seen other companies such as Microsoft explore. Earlier this year, Microsoft filed a patent for a smartphone dock that would have slots for an external display and USB ports, among other things.
Microsoft's patent may just be an idea, but Celio is making it real. Unfortunately, it falls far short of its goals.
With its 8-inch screen, the Redfly C8N model that we tried is just a little bigger than a paperback but smaller than a netbook, like the Asus shown on the left in the picture above. It has no CPU, no on-board memory, no storage and no operating system. Overall, a Redfly terminal has about 70 percent fewer parts internally than your average netbook. Yet it weights 2 pounds, and feels surprisingly hefty.
The keyboard on the device is well laid out and easy to use. Unfortunately, the trackpad is a buzz killer. It just doesn't respond fast or well enough.
Hooking up the terminal to the smartphone is easy. You have to install the Redfly driver (a wireless download) and then connect the phone to the device using a USB cord.
From there on, you can pretty much do everything on the larger-screen terminal that's possible on the phone, including initiating and ending calls. The large screen is identical to what appears on your smartphone's screen, except larger.
But that also pretty much hints at the limitation of Redfly. Got a difficult to use or a bad smartphone? The Redfly terminal will magnify those faults and make the device even more impossible to use.
We tested the Tour. As with all Research In Motion's phones, the Tour has a terrible browser (shown in the photo above). Navigating the browser through Redfly's 8-inch screen is excruciating.
The 480 x 360 pixels scaled up barely fills the Redfly screen leaving wide vertical swaths of black on the terminal's screen. And images that look crisp and rich on the BlackBerry look pixelated and crunchy when blown up on the Redfly's screen.
Kelly says RIM is to blame for the problem. "They don't let others change the native resolution of the phone," he says. "When we connect to the Tour, we try to scale the display so it matches the height of the Redfly screen but we can't do that with the width without distorting it."
Navigating a PC-like device with a smartphone-like user interface can also feel a little schizophrenic. The familiar Windows icons, shortcuts and even the Start menu button are all missing. The lack of 3G or Wi-Fi access also means you are entirely dependent on the phone's cellular network to browse or send e-mails -- which can be spotty and slow to say the least.
The Tour we tested was on Sprint's network so it lacked the productivity tools such the ability to edit documents, because of Sprint-imposed restrictions on the handset. In turn, that limited what we could do with the Redfly.
And now for some sticker shock. The Redfly terminal costs $250.
Given the high price and the many drawbacks, we suggest buying a netbook instead of the Redfly. An Asus Eee PC or a Dell netbook will offer about the same battery life, weigh just a little more, run a wider range of applications and be a better experience. For just about $50 more, you can get yourself a real computer. Buy a smartphone that offers tethering (the ability to use it as a 3G modem) and you'll even be able to get on the internet wherever your phone has data access. That, for our money, is a far better solution than giving your smartphone a bigger, heavier -- but no more capable -- external terminal.
Top Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com, Asus Eee PC-Redfly (Dalelane/Flickr)
