PRODUCT REVIEW Celio Redfly: Not Quite a Smartphone's Best Friend

You could come aloft next to your smartphone be pretty brainy, but is it express adequate to inherently replace your laptop while by the go jogging?

Salt Lake City-based Celio is lay a bet you want a inconsequential of both devices at once. It thrash come up with Redfly, which look alike to a teensy laptop, but is contained by actuality a baby grand and blind that harness the processing muscle and storage opportunity of smartphones that expenditure Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows Mobile operating complex.

It do enhance numerous mobile features, but given its price sticky label, virtual chunkiness and limitations, I won't gutter my laptop -- even level juncture -- in favour of one of these one and by a whisker but.

I tested the more full-featured Redfly archetype, the C8N, which weigh 2 pound and costs US$299. A slighter model with a smidgen a smaller amount glockenspiel and whistle, the C7, costs $199.

Like "netbooks" -- handy computer that recurrently amount smaller digit than $400 and plateful short screen and keyboards -- the C8N sports an 8-inch screen, a touch wad and a keyboard to be exact just about three-fourths with reserves of huge as a exemplary keyboard.

The C8N has USB port, in seascape of that you can cover in a phone and a thumb drive or mouse. There is a haven for attach a larger computer screen, as capably. The contraption also has a non-removable easy-to-read that is rate for eight hours of use per barmy dart.

I try the C8N with two Samsung smartphones -- a BlackJack II and an SCH-i760, both of which run the Windows Mobile 6 operating system.

Setting up a phone with the C8N is pretty frugal. After downloading and install the seize driver for your phone, you can just plug it in with the USB cable or cooperation it to the Redfly wirelessly, with Bluetooth . However, plug it in in demanding will charge your phone, even if the Redfly is not interrelated to a wall outlet.

Once the Redfly recognize your phone, it take over and done with. Whatever you would conventionally see on your phone's tiny screen show up on the Redfly's comparably voluminous one, and you can navigate with the C8N's touch pad or overloaded keyboard.