Celio Redfly Mobile Companion C8

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Review

If you’re on the lookout for a small, light, inexpensive laptop and are happy to sacrifice a few non-essential features for the sake of portability, then you certainly have plenty of choice at the moment. New netbooks are appearing on a regular basis, which means that even if there aren’t any models that take your fancy at the moment, there’s bound to be something to catch your eye by next month.

Alternatively, you could forget netbooks altogether and just stick with your smartphone. After all, many models now pack in as much power as a typical desktop PC of a few years ago, so why bother carrying around a netbook that just duplicates most of its functions?

That’s a question that Celio seeks to answer with the Redfly Mobile Companion C8. It may look like just another netbook, but in fact it’s a smartphone terminal designed for use with a Windows Mobile device. And what’s a ‘smartphone terminal,’ you ask? Read on to find out...

In essence, the Redfly Mobile Companion C8 is nothing more than an external screen and keyboard accessory for a Windows Mobile smartphone. Smartphones may be perfectly capable mobile computers, but their small screens and often non-existent keyboards keep much of that capability locked away – which is where the Redfly comes in.

Once connected via Bluetooth to a Windows Mobile smartphone, the Redfly not only provides a large keyboard to type on, but its 8in screen with an 800 x 480 resolution also provides a much more comfortable working area – most Windows Mobile smartphones are stuck at 240 x 320. Throw in a battery life of around eight hours and you’ll never need to use a traditional laptop again, right?

Well, if you’re happy with a Windows Mobile smartphone as your main mobile computer, then the Redfly Mobile Companion C8 makes a certain amount of sense. It’s smaller and lighter than any netbook we’ve seen so far, and will slip into a bag even more easily than the diminutive Asus Eee PC 701 it most closely resembles. It’s very well made too, and the grippy rubberised finish is a big improvement over the slick plastic cases of other netbooks.

Given that the Redfly is just 229mm wide, its keyboard is obviously cramped, but it’s no less usable than that on the Eee PC 701/900/901. It’s obviously not the kind of keyboard you’d want to write a novel on, but it’s perfectly adequate for shorter writing sessions – once you’ve gotten used to the small size of the keys. Better still, the integral touchpad means that you don’t have to reach for the stylus every time you want to select something on-screen. That “eight hour” battery life is a bit misleading, though – we squeezed just over 11 hours from the Redfly Mobile Companion C8 in our tests.

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