justen

Update: I’m going to forgive the Wall Street Journal, just this once, for stealing my story. Be sure to check out the last section of the article, A Better Substitute, which not only eulogizes the Foleo, but also talks about the growing success of the Redfly.

Meet the Redfly… From a startup called Celio. It looks a lot like a notebook, but it’s really a “mobile companion,” a fledgling category of devices which depend on your mobile phone for its broadband connection and computing power. The Redfly has taken a lot of flack from consumer technology blogs like Engadget, just like the abandoned Palm Foleo.

Over a year ago, I wrote about the Foleo and how I thought it was a good idea. A few months later, Palm (shortsightedly, in my opinion) canceled the Foleo to focus on developing their smartphones. In comes Celio with the Redfly. It’s more along the lines of what the Foleo should have been, at least in my opinion, quite frankly. The Redfly simply gives your smartphone a big display and a full keyboard.

In healthcare this is a given, but, one of the things I spend lots of time obsessing over is information security. If your Redfly is lost or stolen, your only loss is the cost of the device itself. No data is stored on it; the data is either on your smartphone or on your own servers. And, of course, if the smartphone disappears as well, you always have remote kill (and hopefully a layer or two of security on the phone itself, to boot).

The Redfly depends on Windows Mobile smartphones, so iPhone and BlackBerry folks can’t join in on the fun just yet. But I recently had a chance to sit down with a Palm Treo 800w and a Redfly, and I have to say that little phone was more than powerful enough to handle Opera for web browsing, email, and Word document editing, all through the Redfly’s big screen. I especially appreciated the Redfly’s VGA port for projectors, which easily allows you to ditch your notebook for PowerPoint presentations.

As ultramobile processors from Intel, nVidia, and others keep getting smaller, more efficient, and more powerful, I think the proposition of smartphones and mobile companions like the Redfly is going to become more and more attractive, for enterprise customers and your average consumers alike. For Celio, the issue now is to keep building its market, one by one. Remember, most of the media completely missed the point of the first iPod, too.