Home > Consumer Reviews > Official Celio Corp Listing. The Redfly Smartphone Terminal Is a Terminal for Windows Mobile Phones. Easily Use Your Smartphone Email, Attachments, Web Browser and Remote Access. Connects Via Bluetooth or USB (Charges Most Phones), 8 Hour Battery.

When I first saw the product I thought "Who would use it?", and I heard that a lot from the phone podcasts. Once you get your hands on one it really clicks. Its a great device.

Pros
- Charge your phone and have remote access for 8+ hours. While at a remote site last week there was no AC power but had full EVDO signal, used it off and on for 3 days without charging the RedFly. The RedFly charged the phone while in use.
- I use it while on the road, as a passenger, not the driver. Much more portable than a laptop, MUCH longer battery life.
- Great for visiting family with dial-up access.
- I use it for flight planning when not sitting in an airport pilot lounge.
- It turns my HTC Touch into a mini laptop. It is amazing how Mobile Exchange, Word and the browser look on a VGA screen. When connected to the work exchange server its like working at my desk.

Cons
- The keyboard is smaller than normal. Can occasionally be a challenge with large hands. I'm getting better with my typing over time. Its one of the sacrifices of portability.
- AC plug is easy to pull out while charging. Its a very small AC adapter.

Overall, I think it is a great device. I will be carrying it with me while visiting family over Thanksgiving. They all have horribly slow dialup. I tend to get 500-800kbp/sec over EVDO while I'm there. I'll do a little Christmas shopping on the web during the slow times.... :-)

I specialize in providing very small companies with advanced technology including mobile access. I've had the opportunity to test popular laptop formats including the new netbooks. The hassle of maintaining a laptop operating system, syncing data, the weight/heat, waiting for bootups and high cost kept me from ever buying one for myself.

I concluded a few years ago that a screen and keyboard for the phone would be the way to go. I had no idea it could be done as nicely as Celio has done with the Redfly. Open it, press the bluetooth button on the Redfly keyboard and a second later I'm checking email and calendar, entering billing items, remoting to customer servers and looking up things on the net. It was a surprise that the performance over bluetooth would be so snappy.

I've been carrying it with me every day, I've used it to recharge my phone already once. I'm surprised how long the phone runs when connected via bluetooth due to the phone's screen being off. It's great not having to look for an outlet upon reaching my next destination.

You don't realize how powerful windows mobile phones are until you access the OS with a keyboard and large screen. I use PocketInformant, FlexMail, Resco File Explorer, Opera 8.6.5 which help to make WM6 more like windows running on a laptop.

I've been using remote desktop so often that I dedicated an old PC in my office to be the "host". Once remoted in I have Internet Explorer tweaked for the 800x480 screen. I get multiple tabs, roboform password management and it runs a bit faster than IE6 on the phone itself.

It's been awhile since a new technology product fulfilled my expectations as the Redfly has. Highly recommended!

What a cool product. Well built and such a neat idea. My T-Mobile Dash is a little lacking in horsepower so a bit slow. The display is wonderful, very sharp. I find the keyboard a little cramped but very functional. I also have a Bluetooth fold out keyboard by ThinkOutside - it can function at the same time allowing use of the Redfly screen and the slightly larger keyboard.

I did have a bit of trouble installing the necessary Redfly drivers at first. My phone only comes with 64mb RAM. A Google search came up with a freeware app SKTools Lite. It quickly cleared out 10 MB of junk and the install was smooth sailing.

The Redfly is a great concept suffering, like most first releases, from a number of irritating imperfections.

I purchased the device as an alternative to my Dell Inspiron Mini for note taking in meetings and for email while traveling. For these uses the "instant on" functionality and the battery life are great (I'm deeply disappointed in the battery life of the Inspiron Mini).

The keyboard, however, is not suitable for touch typing. My hands are relatively small yet I still find the keys to be too small, too close together and too slippery. It's easy to hit a number key when intending to hit a key in the QWERTY row. It's VERY easy to hit the Redfly system configuration key when you mean to hit the period key. As this pops up the settings configuration screen, it's a maddening error.

The Redfly would be perfect, for me, if the trackpad was abandoned in favor of a j-mouse to allow for larger key sizes and better key spacing.

My AT&T Tilt is configured with an alternate visual theme. The current driver cannot handle the theme's background image and clock display so the top half of the Redfly display is garbled; however, all menus are clear and the problem is not visible when in an application.

Ironically, Web sites not programmed to recognize mobile devices may actually display better on the Redfly than on your mobile phone; sites which recognize mobile devices and shunt you to mobile-specific pages may not take advantage of the large screen size.

I don't regret purchasing the device but look forward to future improvements.

I have been using my Redfly for a few days now and it a great companion to my Treo 700wx. With the Redfly I can leave my laptop at home and travel a lot lighter.

The biggest bonus though is combining the Redfly with RDP. Now I can access my PC desktop remotely and have enough screen real estate to actually get something done. A huge bonus is the ability to use my desktop's browser to surf the web. It ends up being much faster to use my desktop's browser via RDP than to use Opera or IE on my phone. In addition, I don't have to worry about site compatibility or performance issues because the desktop browser does all the rendering. Not to mention that the Redfly's screen is wide enough that with most sites I don't have to do any horizontal scrolling. I have noticed some performance issues if ActiveSync and RDP are running at the same time though so if your phone has a weak processor this might not work.

The only major criticism I would have is that they should make it about an inch or two wider so that they can make the keyboard bigger. You get used to the keyboard but I find I have to type a lot slower to maintain accuracy. Still faster than thumbing it with my Treo, but a bigger keyboard would be nice.