Foleo Killer?
April 4th, 2009, 10:31pm by KelvinPlaying around with the Celio Redfly software that was just released. To review, the Redfly was a smartphone companion that came out shortly after Foleo was announced then subsequently cancelled. The difference? Where Foleo had a processor of it’s own, Redfly was simply a keyboard and hi-res monitor extension of a Windows Mobile smartphone. Didn’t really make sense at $400 or even at the recently reduced price of $200, especially with the advent of the $300 netbook. Celio now seems to be giving up on the hardware market with the release of a software emulator of the Redfly. If you can’t beat ’em, join’em, I guess.
Predictably, it’s pretty lame; Since I can use my phone as a modem anyway, I can’t really see any reason why I’d ever want to use Windows Mobile programs rather than Windows programs. Incidentally, another reason why Foleo missed the mark was that it wasn’t smart enough to really take advantage of the phone as a tethered modem, but it wasn’t dumb enough to simply be using the phone’s data connection without a phone-as-modem plan (like this Redfly).
More screen real estate for Google Maps.
More cells in Excel.
April 4th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Definitely a Foleo killer. Of course, that’s not a very tough bar to jump.
April 5th, 2009 at 8:38 am
You’re right, the Foleo never really had a well-defined niche, but to the extent that it did, netbooks put the final nail in the coffin. If they had ever come to market, they’d be totally dead now.
So lemme get this straight — you’re using your laptop to basically emulate a WinMob smartphone, and using the phone as a modem? I know you said you can already use your phone as a modem — so what possible use is this software? If you only own Docs to Go, but not Excel? If you have a phone-based web browser, but not one on your laptop?
I guess it would be useful if you wanted all your data on your phone — like you needed to carry around a spreadsheet, and just wanted to edit it directly on the phone. But I can’t imagine that happens too often.
April 6th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Yeah, totally stupid. I’ve already uninstalled it. Like I said with the Foleo, it was for people who hated their treos. I’m fine using my phone’s keyboard to respond to emails. If you have to have a full keyboard for longer emails, attach it I guess. if you didn’t have phone-as-modem as an option, maybe this software would be compelling in that circumstance. I dunno. All I know is that Foleo was a weak netbook that still would have required Phone-as-modem. Probably had a better browser than Blazer, but not like Firefox good.