The Redfly (or REDFLY if you like their all-caps nomenclature) is a great, well-made device… which only supports the ugly grand-daddy of mobile OSes, Windows Mobile. Sure, it’s easy to underestimate the venerable OS, but there’s a reason everyone’s excited about everything other than WinMo. With BlackBerry growing in popularity, it could be an excellent partner for Celio, whose market is being eaten up by netbooks and such. Imagine a Redfly working with a BlackBerry Storm 2 — less crappy soft keyboard, more screen space, and no cumbersome extra interfaces.
Celio is obviously aware that it needs to broaden its appeal a bit, and they’re planning on getting BlackBerry stuff up and running by the end of the year. Good for them, but damn, hurry up! They’ve also lowered the price on the existing Redflys by about 15%, so if you wanted to grab a couple for your WinMo-based business or something, now would be a good time.
They’re going to need to sweeten the deal a bit, though. Everybody likes cloud stuff and backups, so maybe something like that? Or local backup of your emails and phone storage onto an SD card for faster access? I don’t know. These things might complicate the device, and its simplicity is perhaps its most enticing aspect.
Just while were on the subject of Blackberry’s, I’d like to say I absolutely loathe how everyone makes this distinction between regular cell phones/smart phones and Blackberry’s. Blackberry’s ARE just smartphones; Blackberry being a brand. While they may be pretty good, making this distinction is like saying Blackberry is in another leage (above?) smartphones perhaps, which really isn’t true. My two cents.
Well I guess that’s because Blackberry invented the smarphone. Kinda like tissue is call Kleenex and petroleum jelly is called Vaseline.
This would be a really compelling device for people with Global Blackberry plans. We would have legal worldwide internet as part of our plan.
We are moving into a market where the major hitters are going to be testing all sorts of hybrid devices that are somewhere between a windows mobile phone full of smartphone features and a netbook. It is coming soon.. trust me.
To bad they will not be able to play blackberry videos