Customer Reviews

Official Celio Corp Listing. The Redfly Smartphone Terminal Is a Terminal for Windows Mobile Phones. Easily Use Your Smartphone Email, Attachments, Web Browser and Remote Access. Connects Via Bluetooth or USB (Charges Most Phones), 8 Hour Battery.

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great device that takes a little while to wrap your head around. It is a keyboard and screen extender for your windows mobile smartphone - without your phone it is completely useless, but with your phone it can bridge the usability gap between smartphone and full sized laptop. For some people a netbook may be a better choice, but for myself (and I suspect many others) this is a great tool.

Things I like about it:

1. Convenient to use
From hitting the power button to ready to function is around 10-15 seconds. If I use bluetooth I don't even need to get my phone out of it's holster or pocket. When I am travelling and need to deal with a work email I am often faced with the choice of struggling with the thumb keyboard of my smartphone or the hassle of resuming my laptop from sleep, tethering my phone, retrieving the email message and then dealing with it on a real keyboard. Normally the thumb keyboard wins, but the redfly quick boot and pair time combined with the fact that the email is already on my smartphone makes it a no brainer for all but the shortest replies.

2. Great Battery Life
I've yet to run my Redfly battery out yet, and it charges my cell phone while I use it! This is great for long meetings or all day seminars where you want to have access to email or note taking but can't always get access to a power socket. My laptop has only a couple of hours at best, base model netbooks with 3 cell batteries are likewise only a few hours.

3. Can replace my laptop on vacation
When I am vacation I will take my phone, but find I am also carting my laptop to deal with email and light web browsing (reservations, finding tourist info etcetera). With the Redfly I can leave my laptop at home.

Things that could be improved:

1. No Ethernet
Sometimes when you travel a WiFi hotspot is not available and data roaming charges are just horrible. This is the main weakness with using the Redfly as a laptop replacement while on vacation. If your phone doesn't have wifi then things are even more grim.

2. Browser performance
This is more an issue with windows mobile devices in general, but the limited cpu and memory capabilities of the devices can make browsing to be somewhat of a chore. I'm using Opera 8.65 with an ATT Tilt as the latest Opera Beta doesn't work with the Redfly, things may be better if/when that incompatability gets resolved.

3. Video Performance
You not going to use the Redfly combined with your smartphone to replace a portable DVD player.

Do not buy into all the "This is a Foleo" or "Buy a EEE PC instead" arguments. Yes its true that the Redfly does not give you full laptop capabilities, it should also be noted that you have absolutely zero maintenance with a Redfly. There is only one thing you have to do with it; charge it every couple days. Grab it and go. The USB ports on the back allow you to connect a number of things. Mouse, USB memory, I like to use a LED flex light when I am working in bed. Some apps do not work, mainly video playback, and some browsers like the latest Opera or Skyfire. This is a good device for someone who is a power ppc user.

I can't believe how much easier it's been to actually type and send an email from my Tilt phone. Viewing and typing word doc's, spread sheets, etc. has become so much more portable for me. My hands aren't small by any means so typing on my phone's keyboard has not been easy, in fact I do very little of it lately. I hate getting the stylus out, too.
Now the Redfly came along at a price I could afford and things have really opened up as far as my phone and I are concerned! After very little practice I and my large hands have mastered a pretty good pace.

From a woman's standpoint:
1) it fits in my purse, which really matters when you don't want to lug a purse AND a laptop bag.
2) it looks really sharp, color-wise and the feel of it, almost like a leather-type surface yet seems to offer great protection from scratches hauling it in and out of my purse. It could come in an all-black version for the guys though. The stretchy drawstring bag it comes with is perfect - form-fitting and added protection from items in my purse.
3)I feel a laptop is more cumbersome for me and this size is so "haul-able", not heavy at all but with some heft to it - not cheap feeling.
4) Since being a woman, I have the option to say looks are important in my gadgets, I like the "prettiness" of things lol, and I would like to have my home screen rendered on the Redfly, although that could very well be the phone's issue.
5) It's so easy to get the Redfly out of my purse, hit the power button, hit the bluetooth button and I'm looking at my phone's screen, NO waiting at all. Ready for a quick/easy addition to the grocery list as we're driving to the store. Or to look up directions on Google Maps and have a much larger viewing area to go by.

The power button is flush with the side and requires little pressure to operate, which can be a downfall if carried in a purse as I've seen the green "power" lite on already when pulling out the Redfly, probably from something in my purse, thinking "crap, the battery's probably almost drained", but then the awesome battery life of the product let me do everything I needed to do and still had life left so not a thing wrong with THAT!

Video viewing would be awesome, that's a downer. And it'd be nice if some more app vendors would help out with compatibility.

Sorry for the rambling but I just can't say enough good about this product. Overall, I'm ecstatic with my purchase!!! It has opened up my relationship with my phone to a point where my husband is getting jealous!

The Redfly is a great tool that allows me to surf the internet, compose and answer emails, and remotely control my desktop in ways not possible on a the phone's native QVGA screen.

What it is not is a UMPC; in many ways it is better. Instant startup time and long battery life make it a great travel companion. Flip open the lid, hit the power button and the Bluetooth button, and you are connected to your phone in the state that you last left it -- no need to take your phone out of your pocket or bag. Instantly shut it down without worrying about hard drive corruption. No OS maintenance is required and no back office licensing headaches, either.

The only thing that the Redfly does not do well, or at all, is video. Watching movies or streaming video is fruitless.

I am a Windows Mobile applications engineer and consider the Redfly to be a great deal for the promo price of $199.

I purchased this a couple of weeks ago, and it arrived last week. I've held off on my review, because frankly I was so impressed with my out of the box experience that I wanted a few days to make sure I provided a factually correct review.

Pro's
- Paired perfectly with my Tilt, the first time, and every time thereafter. If anyone's experienced the wonder's of Activesync, connecting a PPC to a computer (intermittent at best) - you'll appreciate this as much as I
- Solid construction. I wasn't sure quite what to expect - the Redfly is well built.
- Near laptop experience - This won't give you a laptop. What it will give you is access to e-mail, web, applications and docs on your PDA in a form factor that you can work with. If anyone's typed an e-mail greater than 15 words on the Tilt's thumb keyboard, you'll know what I'm talking about. MOST applications scale automatically to the larger screen (Flexmail, Pocket Informant, Opera 8.65, TextMaker, the IM app that comes installed on the Tilt all work without issue).

- Cons - it can be a bit slow, but this is most likely due to the processor on the phone. Typing in forms in a web based application, the letters tend to lag a bit. In all fairness, I was in a low memory condition on the phone at the time (multiple pages opened in Opera, Flexmail and PI running at the same time). I've not seen the typing lag all the time, so I'm guessing it's due to the phone's processor / memory.
- Video support - It's a bit of a con, but honestly, I purchased this as a productivity device, not an entertainment device.

I've seen comments about pricing - here's how I justified it:
Bluetooth Keyboard - ~$100.00
Spare Battery / Charger for the Tilt - ~$80.00
Display - not sure one is available.
Aspirin saved due to easier for these 40+ year old eyes - LOTS!

Ability to do work, when and where I want/ need to, without lugging a laptop, or worrying about a public WIFI network - Priceless.

It does what its supposed to very well. It's not a true laptop replacement, but in my case, I don't need the power of a laptop for most of my remote work.

So far so good, It hooked up both in USB and BlueTooth with no hassle whatsoever.

It's a little bigger than pocket size, but it will fit comfortably in a man purse, or maybe even a largish organizer.

First very quick impression; I like it!

It's not worth $500, but it's definately worth $200; just for the browser. I tried all the ordinarily troublesome sites I use like my webmail, bank, HMO Yahoo and Google personal portals and everything works except Gmail. And I'm just about done using that anyway!

The software/firmware is still not ready for prime time. When I run anything that appropriates the top (icon) bar, it doesn't give it back, and it disables the mouse clicks on the icons. That means that I have to revert to hotkeys to do simple things like close a program. I've read that this might be due to the today screen plugin not always being compatible. I use the standard HTC plugin, so to my way of thinking, If they are advertising compatibility with an HTC Touch the HTC plugin should work.

I generally don't like running beta software, but I downloaded the HTC Touch WinMo 6.1 beta driver anyway. The tested driver is for WinMo 6.0.

The REDFLY works better now.

The icon bar issue seems to be fixed, but the today screen still wasn't rendering properly. The Time/Date item at the top and the Calendar at the bottom were only showing a grey screen and "A picture is supposed to be here" icon. I changed the Theme to the ugly green WinMo 6.1 default screen, and those came back.

I ran it both in USB and BlueTooth mode, and that all worked as before, and I brought up BeJeweled II which takes over the whole screen. Everything came back to normal when I closed it.

The advantages:

1. Browser: PIE sux, but then what else is new? That's just PIE! Opera 8.65 is WONDERFUL! It's at least as good as my Nokia N800, and I don't have to put up with Linux or being tied to a wifi hotspot. There are a few websites that don't work as advertised, most notably most things Google. But most of the others work fine. More than on the Nokia. One of the things I like about the Nokia is the absolutely gorgeous screen. The REDFLY is at least as good, and bigger. For my OLD eyeballs, that's important.

2. Ebooks: Better than Kindle at half the price.

3. Email: Can read the WHOLE thing.

4. Office, Within the limits of Office Mobile, everything works great!

5. Boots up in less time than recovering from standby on my FlipStart UMPC, and has a better form factor. For a while I thought the FS was going to be my answer, but short battery life and extremely long bootup times prevented that.

6. Battery lasts ALL DAY! Even when keeping the phone charged.

This thing REALLY NEEDS a touchscreen. I can't count the number of times I poked the screen with my finger expecting something to happen, only to remember that I needed to use the curser/touchpad and swearing at myself for forgetting.

I bought this and a windows smartphone PPC (Sprint Treo 800w) to become more efficient at work. I work in a very large Fortune 20 company and I spend most of my day and organize my life be working with outlook 2003 calendar, tasks, memos, webex, netmeeting, etc. Because I am so mobile, i used to lug my laptop around to all of my meetings, but we dont have wifi everywhere and I get horrible battery life, etc. I started to use my palm OS treo 700P to take notes, check calendar, create appointments, etc but it was too small to do any serious work. Then I stumbled upon the redfly and started reading the various reviews and posts at treocentral.com / wmexperts.com and I thought it would be perfect for what I do. With the redfly at $199 I thought I would give it a shot. I ordered a treo 800w (windows smartphone) and the redfly.

Well today was my first day with the combo at work and holey smokes, does it work well. I am still learning the ropes of windows mobile, but I was able to use the redfly to take notes and view my calendar in two meetings today. I also VPN'ed into our company intranet and navigated our internal erooms and sharepoint sites. THe large screen makes viewing web content great for such a small device. The battery life is fantastic. The only bummer is that you cant display full motion video due to lag. Working normally with business applications like outlook, internet explorer, etc work like a champ.

If you are a mobile warrior and you can rely 100% on your smartphone, this is the tool to get.

Just got my redfly in last night - took it in to work on the train w/ me this morning.
Very impressed.
Build quality is top notch - this thing feels nice and solid, but not heavy.
Keyboard layout is nice - adding phone function to fn keys is great!
Screen is nice and bright - very easy to read.
Initial set-up is completely idiot proof, took less than three minutes.
Touchpad will change your life. Having a mouse makes this a 200 dollar laptop.
Startup is damn near instantaneous.

Great Product - if you have a winmo smartphone, this is a MUST BUY!!!

I already use my phone like a tiny computer, but the addition of the Redfly makes the conecpt much more acceptable. The long life battery last me through my East-to-West coast flights (4 hours) with plenty of battery life left over for other work and presentations. The additional USB port on the device gives the unit access to external (Fat32) drives ; my device normally would not have access to these drives.

This is a great extion of your phone the products does everything it says it does and more. Great when answering emails and surfing the web on the go. Lose alot of pounds not haveing to carry my laptop wait for it to boot up this product has instan on up and running in 35 seconds. Nothing but good things to say about this product and at this new great price it is a steal bu one now before the price goes up. Pleas don't listen to anything negative that you read on the internet about this product because are people who do not have or have use this products because once you get one and use it for youurself it is great.