Celio Redfly Mobile Companion C8

If you’re on the lookout for a small, light, inexpensive laptop and are happy to sacrifice a few non-essential features for the sake of portability, then you certainly have plenty of choice at the moment. New netbooks are appearing on a regular basis, which means that even if there aren’t any models that take your fancy at the moment, there’s bound to be something to catch your eye by next month.

Alternatively, you could forget netbooks altogether and just stick with your smartphone. After all, many models now pack in as much power as a typical desktop PC of a few years ago, so why bother carrying around a netbook that just duplicates most of its functions?

That’s a question that Celio seeks to answer with the Redfly Mobile Companion C8. It may look like just another netbook, but in fact it’s a smartphone terminal designed for use with a Windows Mobile device. And what’s a ‘smartphone terminal,’ you ask? Read on to find out...

In essence, the Redfly Mobile Companion C8 is nothing more than an external screen and keyboard accessory for a Windows Mobile smartphone. Smartphones may be perfectly capable mobile computers, but their small screens and often non-existent keyboards keep much of that capability locked away – which is where the Redfly comes in.

Once connected via Bluetooth to a Windows Mobile smartphone, the Redfly not only provides a large keyboard to type on, but its 8in screen with an 800 x 480 resolution also provides a much more comfortable working area – most Windows Mobile smartphones are stuck at 240 x 320. Throw in a battery life of around eight hours and you’ll never need to use a traditional laptop again, right?

Well, if you’re happy with a Windows Mobile smartphone as your main mobile computer, then the Redfly Mobile Companion C8 makes a certain amount of sense. It’s smaller and lighter than any netbook we’ve seen so far, and will slip into a bag even more easily than the diminutive Asus Eee PC 701 it most closely resembles. It’s very well made too, and the grippy rubberised finish is a big improvement over the slick plastic cases of other netbooks.

Given that the Redfly is just 229mm wide, its keyboard is obviously cramped, but it’s no less usable than that on the Eee PC 701/ 900/ 901. It’s obviously not the kind of keyboard you’d want to write a novel on, but it’s perfectly adequate for shorter writing sessions – once you’ve gotten used to the small size of the keys. Better still, the integral touchpad means that you don’t have to reach for the stylus every time you want to select something on-screen. That “eight hour” battery life is a bit misleading, though – we squeezed just over 11 hours from the Redfly Mobile Companion C8 in our tests.

Connecting a smartphone to the Redfly is simple enough – with the Windows Mobile driver installed, you just make an initial USB connection to get things going, then all subsequent connections are automatically established over Bluetooth.

Unfortunately, the list of supported smartphones is rather short and a huge number of models are missing from Celio’s compatibility list. There are no real hardware requirements beyond Bluetooth though, and we were able to use the Redfly successfully with the unsupported HTC TyTN simply by installing the driver anyway. Sadly, this loophole has now been closed and the driver now checks the smartphone’s supposed compatibility before it will install. In other words, if your handset isn’t on the list, you’re out of luck.

Instant on and off make the Redfly a useful gadget for note-taking, but it still takes a second or two to establish a Bluetooth connection with your smartphone, and you also have to wait while the appropriate Windows Mobile application loads. And this is where the Redfly’s problems really begin.

What Celio thinks is the Redfly Mobile Companion C8’s biggest strength is really its biggest weakness. With no processing power of its own to speak of, the Redfly is wholly reliant on your Windows Mobile smartphone for its function. For most tasks, this isn’t an issue and when you’re typing away in Pocket Word or working on a spreadsheet in Excel, it’s easy to forget that you’re working in on a smartphone.

Try browsing the web, however, and the Redfly’s limitations soon become apparent. Pocket Internet Explorer doesn’t far too badly at rendering web pages at 800 x480, but it’s slow to display a web page of any complexity, even over a Wi-Fi connection. Worse still, scrolling through a web page is a tediously slow task that’s made all the more painful by the interminable lag. Things are even worse in Google Maps, where it’s all too easy for the application to get stuck in its own little loop of scrolling around a map when you’ve long since stopped.

This ponderous pace is no doubt partly due to the limited bandwidth of the Bluetooth connection, but we can’t help wondering if the processor inside the Redfly is playing its own detrimental part, too. Sadly, switching to a different web browser doesn’t help things either, and both Iris and Opera Mobile are just as slow. And the latest beta of Opera Mobile 9.5 doesn’t work at all with the Redfly.

In fact application compatibility is a bit hit and miss with the Redfly and just because a program runs on the smartphone doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use it on a big screen. Using Spb Mobile Shell as your Today screen leads to an “out of memory” error on the Redfly, while other Today screens simply refuse to render properly.

Unfortunately, even if these are issues that can be addressed with a firmware update, the Redfly Mobile Companion C8 has a bigger problem that’s less easily solved – its price. At around £320, the Redfly is a smartphone accessory that costs as much as a fully fledged computer, and that can’t be right. The same amount of money buys an Asus Eee PC 1000 and while it’s a little bigger and a little heavier than the Redfly, it runs Windows XP and yet still has a 10-hour battery life.

If your mobile needs are fulfilled solely by your smartphone and you have the patience of a saint, then the Redfly Mobile Companion C8 may be worth considering. But the inescapable fact is that a device like the Redfly is never going to appeal to the masses and if you’re going to spend £300-odd on a laptop like device to carry around with your smartphone, you might as well buy a laptop.