Today's high-end smartphones aren't toys. My current mobile device has all the processing power of a laptop made just a few years ago. But they have a limitation: because phones have to be small enough to easily fit in your pocket, their displays and keyboards must be tiny when compared to those in a laptop. The typical solution for this is for people to carry both a smartphone and a laptop. But in many cases this is an inefficient solution. For some people, the smartphone would be able to do everything they need if it just had a larger keyboard and screen. That's where the Redfly Mobile Companion comes in. It's a device that -- rather than seeking to replace the smartphone -- enhances it by adding a larger display, a full-size keyboard, and USB ports. Here's how it works. You're using your smartphone to, for example, check your email. A message comes in with a large Excel spreadsheet attached, and you quickly find that scrolling around all the columns and rows is frustrating on a 2.8-inch, QVGA display. So you open up the Redfly Mobile Companion and plug your smartphone in. In a couple of seconds, the spreadsheet is displayed on the larger device's 8-inch, WVGA (800 by 480 pixel) screen. There's no synchronizing or re-downloading the message; you are exactly where you were on the smartphone. To continue with the example, suppose you make a change to the spreadsheet and want to email it back, with a response. You can use the Redfly device's QWERTY keyboard to quickly type this out. But what if you're interrupted and it's time to go? You can disconnect the Mobile Companion, close it up, and head out. As soon as you're on the move again, you open up your smartphone and you're half written email is right there on the screen, ready for you to finish it up and send it. At launch, Celio's product will only support Windows Mobile devices, probably because this operating system handles different screen resolutions so easily. This means that applications don't have to be re-written to run on the Redfly Mobile Companion. I only saw the standard apps demonstrated, though.

Checking Out the Hardware

The Mobile Companion is not intended to be pocket-sized, but it's still very portable at 9 inches wide, 6 inches deep, 1 inch thick, and about 2 pounds. I've already talked about the screen, so it's time to talk a bit about the keyboard. This is 8.3 inches wide -- a bit smaller than one you'd find on a desktop, but this wasn't really noticeable in my, admittedly, very limited tests. It has 80 keys, including a row dedicated to numbers and another to functions. ... more>>>