Redfly: Mobile Companion

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

Comments

[Nik]

Don't put too much faith in the remote wipe if your threat model includes a relatively skilled attacker. A £30 GSM jammer will prevent remote wipe from working while the stolen handset is forensically imaged.

Remote wipe is of course great for protecting against casual theft, but the absence of fully integrated full content encryption of mobile devices as a default feature is a real concern for us more paranoid types :)

[Daniel Noakes]

Good point, or save £30 and pop the SIM card out. Internally and on our hosted service we use the encryption options which is enforced on both device and external memory, we also have a short lockout time set.

Most instances I have seen are where the user has left it somewhere or they can't find it, rather than theft. In any case we always stress there ust be a data connection for it to work.

Something else to consider is that if you are using mobile VPN you could consume CRM and WSS data from the "cloud" reducing the amount of data actually stored on the device.

Daniel