{"id":277,"date":"2008-06-04T23:33:04","date_gmt":"2008-06-04T23:33:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=277"},"modified":"2008-08-15T11:36:55","modified_gmt":"2008-08-15T11:36:55","slug":"celio-redfly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=277","title":{"rendered":"Celio Redfly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is a good day – a new gadget arrived today. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

It’s a Celio Redfly<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Why?<\/strong>
\nI’m gonna try and make the case for the Redfly. This could be a futile effort – to be honest, they’re after a fairly narrow niche of the market, and if this is your sort of thing, you probably already know what it is. But here goes!<\/p>\n

\"IBM<\/a>If you want to work (keep in touch, access the Internet, refer to notes and documents, etc.), you can get a computer. <\/p>\n

Brill.
<\/p>\n

\"IBM<\/a> \"Treo<\/a>What if you also want to work when you’re not at your computer? <\/p>\n

Get a computer and a smartphone\/PDA to carry with you when you’re out and about. <\/p>\n

Sync the two so you can access the same information whichever one you’re using.
<\/p>\n

\"IBM<\/a> \"HTC<\/a>What if you want to work when you’re not at your computer, but the teeny tiny screen on a smartphone\/PDA isn’t big enough? <\/p>\n

Get a really big-ass smartphone \/ PDA with a huge screen and sync that with your computer instead!
<\/p>\n

\"IBM<\/a> \"Treo<\/a> \"Asus<\/a>What if you want to work when you’re not at your computer, but don’t want to try and make calls on a phone roughly the size and weight of your first car? <\/p>\n

Get a computer, a regular smartphone for quick tasks like looking stuff up on the go, and a mini-laptop\/UMPC like an EEE PC for when you want to do more involved work that needs a bigger screen.
<\/p>\n

\"IBM<\/a> \"Treo<\/a> \"Celio<\/a>The problem with that is that syncing two devices is bad enough<\/a>. Keeping three in sync is just a major headache. <\/p>\n

Sure there are some workarounds, like working off USB memory sticks or keeping everything online, but these aren’t ideal. <\/p>\n

Enter the Redfly<\/a> from Celio<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"Celio<\/a>It looks like a laptop, and is virtually the same size as the EEE PC<\/a>. <\/p>\n

But it’s a dumb terminal without it’s own processor or storage – it pairs with a smartphone (by USB or Bluetooth) and runs from there. It’s basically the same as plugging a monitor and keyboard into your laptop – you’re still using your laptop, just with more comfortable peripherals.<\/p>\n

With the Redfly, you’re still using your smartphone, just from the keyboard and display of the Redfly. <\/p>\n

I’ve only had a little time to play with it tonight, so here are my first impressions:<\/p>\n

\"Celio<\/a>Battery life is the key<\/strong>
\nWithout needing to run stuff like a processor or memory, the battery life is supposed to be miles better than the EEE PC<\/a>. Celio reckons 8 hours of usage is typical. I’ve not used it long enough to see this for myself, but most reviews I’ve read have said that this is a realistic figure. If it’s true, that is almost enough to convince me of the value of it. <\/p>\n

(A drawback to this might have been that I wouldn’t get 8 hours of work out of my smartphones, but if you connect it to your smartphone\/PDA by USB, it charges the smartphone while you work!)<\/p>\n

Screen size… wow<\/strong>
\n\"Celio<\/a>The screen is bigger than EEE PCs<\/a> (mainly because of the fat border you get round the screen on the EEE PCs). And it’s a ‘proper’ big screen – they don’t just scale the smartphone’s display, the resolution is increased. So you don’t get same number of letters on a screen but bigger, you really get more letters on a screen. <\/p>\n

The difference is striking – some of the core apps like Pocket Word and Pocket Excel become a thousand times more usable when you can see them through a 800×480 resolution screen. You can see what I mean if you check out the screenshots on Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows<\/a>. <\/p>\n

My mobile setup before this was using a smartphone with a folding bluetooth keyboard<\/a> and small pocket mouse. This makes for a much more comfortable way to work than on the smartphones own keyboard. But you’re still staring at a very small screen, and it’s a pain to use if you’re not at a table – balancing the folding keyboard with the screen precariously perched on top is a nightmare on your lap. I’ve been on train journeys where it was easier to just work on the smartphone’s own thumbboard rather than persist with the balancing act. This solves both problems – a very usable screen, with a laptop form-factor that makes it usable on your lap. <\/p>\n

It’s not all rosy<\/strong>
\nBefore I start sharing my gripes, it’s only fair to point out a couple of things:
\n1) This isn’t a finished consumer retail product. This is proper early-adopter bleeding edge stuff<\/a> – an <\/p>\n

“…Evaluation\/Demo Unit Pre-Order … offer[ed] … directly to enterprise customers for evaluation and mobile solution providers for demonstration…”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

2) I’m using it on a smartphone that isn’t on Celio’s list of compatible, supported phones<\/a>.
\nSo take my moans with a massive pinch of salt, okay?<\/p>\n

Right… with that out of the way. <\/p>\n

It’s overpriced. I’m embarrassed to even admit how much I spent on it. I know it’s early adopter, I know they’re going for the enterprise market… but even so. Let’s just say I was having a bad day, and this was something of an impulse-related comfort purchase. <\/p>\n

\"Celio<\/a>Not all apps work. Because it’s not just reproducing the same display but bigger, but actually drawing a larger resolution display, some applications go a little funky. Many of them scale without any problems. <\/p>\n

My most-used apps – for example, Pocket Outlook, Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, my own wiki note-taking app<\/a>, SPB Finance<\/a>, Pocket Informant<\/a> – all scale perfectly. (I would say ‘phew’, but I’d already checked this – Chris shared a neat way to customise the Windows Mobile emulator to run at the larger resolution<\/a>). <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, a few apps don’t work. In particular, native (rather than managed, .NET, apps) and Java applications seem to struggle. I was especially dismayed to see that my mobile IM client of choice, Slick<\/a>, is completely unusuable.<\/p>\n

There are quirky video driver issues. This is massively in the territory of not-using-a-supported-smartphone, so this is really an unfair comment. Text is fine, but images on webpages and documents sometimes appear a little warped, icons can be distorted or be painted behind the background, that sort of thing. It’s not a major problem for me (I work with text more often than images!) but it’s something that I hope would get resolved when they get around to writing the drivers for the HTC Advantage.<\/strike> Update (13th Aug):<\/strong> Celio have released a firmware update which has resolved these issues!<\/p>\n

\"Celio<\/a>The power cable sucks. Overall, the build quality of the Redfly is amazing – it feels like a sturdy and reliable piece of kit, and the finish on outside is lovely. With such attention to detail, I’m amazed that they ship it with this flakey little AC adaptor the end of which drops out of the Redfly if you so much as breathe on it. It’s a good thing the battery life is decent, because once you plug this thing in, you really don’t want to touch it again until it’s charged. Gah.<\/p>\n

Install wasn’t entirely smooth. setup.exe installed the wrong driver on my phone – a driver for a non-touchscreen smartphone device – that crashes and breaks the Redfly-smartphone connection anytime you do anything that isn’t possible on a non-touchscreen device, like open a context menu. Again, this is entirely understandable – my phone isn’t on the list of supported devices that it knows about so when it queried my mobile for it’s make\/model, it would have got back an unknown result. When I manually chose a driver from their website (I went with the driver for the AT&T Tilt, thinking it’d be the most similar to my device<\/em>), those problems all went away. <\/p>\n

These are minor quibbles. So far, I love my new toy. I’ve only had a quick chance to play with it, but it’s definitely gonna be getting a lot of use in the next few days and weeks, and I’ll write another post if my first impressions are way off. But for now, me like \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is a good day – a new gadget arrived today. \ud83d\ude42 It’s a Celio Redfly. Why? I’m gonna try and make the case for the Redfly. This could be a futile effort – to be honest, they’re after a fairly narrow niche of the market, and if this is your sort of thing, you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[220,221,223,222],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-celio","tag-celio-redfly","tag-foleo","tag-redfly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}