I have had my eye on Celio Redfly for a long time and last week Expansys started selling it for about £130, get more information at www.celiocorp.com.
The Redfly is a terminal device for connecting to a Windows Mobile phone, Celio call it a mobile companion. I use mail and calendar on my phone a lot and it does the job well, but if you have ever tried to use Word or Excel things are not so great. So by adding a larger screen, keyboard and mouse can you ditch the laptop?
I was very surprised just how usable Office Mobile and even Pocket IE becomes on a larger screen, I wrote this blog post very easily. I only found a few occasions where I needed a desktop application, at which point I used Remote Desktop mobile to connect to my PC. A great demo of this is and an insight in to mobile vitalisation is on YouTube.
You can connect using Bluetooth by just powering on the Redfly (~2 secs) and pressing the Bluetooth button. If you use USB it will charge your phone from the internal 8hr battery.
A few more highlights come from the systems administrator point of view. If the Redfly gets lost there is no data at risk, all data is on the Windows Mobile which can be remote wiped at the click of a button. I haven't seen too many laptops that can do that. It is also one less device that needs security and anti-virus updates.
Daniel
