Celio Corp is a mobile software developer that wants to let you replace your computer with your smartphone. It creates solutions to let you use your smartphone with a large screen and keyboard. Today, Celio is taking the odd step of offering to send one of it’s beta users on a holiday to Hawaii in return for feedback on it’s most recent product – REDFLY Mobile Viewer for Windows phones. So if you fancy a free trip, go and sign up. But this kind of attention-grabbing technique makes me wonder what their test-base is like.
The beta REDFLY Mobile Viewer allows Windows phones apps to run at full screen-size on Windows XP and Vista PCs. Celio’s long term plan is to let any smartphone connect to any larger screen and keyboard. There are REDFLY peripherals available from the Celio website
Current beta testers, and new users who join by June, can partake in a survey. All respondents will have a chance to win two free airline tickets to Hawaii.
From the release:
‘We’ve had an overwhelming response and thousands of people have downloaded the REDFLY Mobile Viewer already,’ said Kirt Bailey, president and CEO of Celio Corp. ‘Our goal is to give our customers the best product possible, and by offering this trip as incentive, users that have already downloaded the application and those interested in trying it out will be motivated to provide us with valuable feedback on their experience.’
What we think?
Ok, my first reaction to this was to be perplexed. The single-minded purpose of design behind smartphones is to create a rich set of services that can be used on a tiny screen. It just seems to me that the Celio product line runs completely counter to the very purpose of smartphones. It’s true that many people would like a bluetooth keyboard for their smartphones, but both soft and hard QWERTY keyboards have come on in leaps and bounds. As for the large screen size… there are already a lot of very powerful, multi-use devices that run on a large screen. They’re called computers.
However, a quick survey of my office-mates here lets me know that I’m being a bit narrow-viewed here. This kind of product is actually very useful for people who typically do a lot of actual work from their smartphones. It can be used significantly in meetings, and is handy to have it running alongside your work compute. This is more of an enterprise-class service. Quite a number of REDFLY products are available, both from Celio Corp and from retailers, so it’s obviously something that some people want to use. I’m still bothered that Celio is essentially bribing people to send them feedback, though.
I have the original Celio Redfly and can see the logic behind it, especially for day trips interstate and customer presentation visits. Theoretically, you don’t need to carry your laptop and should be able to do the following more quickly and effectively versus just having the phone:
- Receive and send emails
- Browse the web, especially to run SaaS apps like SalesForce
- View and edit Word and Excel documents
- Run powerpoint presentations
It is significantly smaller and lighter than a netbook or laptop, has a much longer battery life (8 hours) and can even charge your phone.
Unfortunately these ambitions are let down by a couple of key issues which are probably associated with my choice of smartphone (HTC Diamond):
1. It makes the responsiveness of the phone even slower
2. The rendering engine makes poor use of the available screen real estate as the menu bar fonts (top and bottom) are much too big
The software updates over the past few months have improved the situation slightly but still not to the point where it works for me personally.