<<<... Beneath the keyboard is a trackpad that's 2.9 inches wide and 1.0 inch high, or you can plug in a USB mouse if you'd prefer. It has a pair of USB 2.0 ports, allowing you to hook up a limited selection of peripherals: keydrives, mice, and keyboards. The Mobile Companion also has a video-out port. This allows you to hook up a projector or external monitor if you'd like to give presentations.

Wired or Wireless

You have the option of connecting your smartphone to this device via a USB cable or Bluetooth. Frankly, though, the Bluetooth connection seems like more of a parlor trick than anything else. The wireless hook up is, of course, noticeably slower. It's still usable, but because you have to have the Redfly Mobile Companion and your smartphone near each other for them to work, I don't see much reason to pass up the advantages of running a wire between them. In addition to a faster connection, a physical hookup allows the Celio's device's relatively large internal battery to charge your smartphone. Without charging the phone, the Mobile companion can go for 8 hours on a single charge. That's Celio's estimate, anyway. How much this will be reduced by the smartphone depends on the smaller device's battery life when the two are connected. In this situation, the phone's screen will be off, but it will likely have some kind of wireless networking constantly active, either Wi-Fi or 3G. Still, I'd say 6 hours for the combo is probably a conservative guess, and it could easily be longer.

A Significant Limitation

Unfortunately, there's a fairly big hole in the Mobile Companion's feature set: multimedia. The Redfly device isn't able to increase the resolution of video for the larger screen, so if you play a movie from your QVGA smartphone, it will appear on the Mobile Companion at that same resolution. This device also doesn't include speakers, so you'll have connect your headphone or headset to your smartphone. When I asked the people from Celio about this, they pointed out that their product is intended for business users. I responded by saying that even business users like to watch movies on the plane, and they said perhaps greater support for multimedia might be included in a later version. ... more>>>