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Can REDFLY sell in an EeePC market?
palmsolo (aka Matthew Miller) writes "I was lucky enough to get a chance to evaluate an early beta of the REDFLY device and just posted some initial impressions at ZDNet. As a person who commutes on the train 2 hours every day and usually always has a Windows Mobile device in tow, this is actually a perfect device for me; real productivity is possible with text entry and enjoy surfing on a larger display. However, at $500 can this device really compete in the Asus EeePC market or will it die like the Palm Foleo?"
You don't market phone OS to users -- you market it to cellular carriers.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm thinking more long-term. Sure, the EeePC has sold well so far, but it seems mostly as a novelty. Even among the people I talk to about them they complain about the small disk space, strained eyes with extended use, etc. As other laptops become cheaper and remain far superior to the EeePC, I forsee them quickly dropping away.
Am I reading this right? Is this thing just a glorified keyboard and monitor? For $500? I could get a crappy laptop for that much.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Do not, I repeat, DO NOT REQUIRE a smartphone to use said sub-laptop. You are missing the point entirely. The EEE pc doesn't require you to have a pricey smart phone, nor a potentially pricey data plan to use. It has this wonderful concept of not requiring it at all. That's what bewlidered me on the ill-fated Foleo. Why spend so many dollars that is a parasitic device where you can just get a laptop already?
These convergence devices bug me to a certain point. I turned off my wireless data plan and opted for a plain-jane phone when I realized I never used it enough to justify its cost. So with the few poeple like me that are cheapskates when it comes to a cell phone, you lost a customer if your 'top requires it. What if I just want to use existing free wifi spots or just go offline to whip up some notes or play games?
Let's not add a needless layer of complication to the equation. Pricing it to $100 less than a real laptop is just asking for failure. So if you sell off your cell phone, do you sell off the redfly as well?
With the multitude of super-subnotebooks out there that can run a real OS (WinXP, Linux) with real applications that don't require a "host PC" (even my Toshiba Libretto 110CT with 64MB RAM from 1998 has more potential than this pice of junk), and given the eeePC + XP-Home costs the same as this, what is the market for such a machine at this price??? Cut the price in half and it might be worth talking about...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I made out better forking over $500 for an EEE PC, a 2 gig ram upgrade, 16gig SD drive, and USB drive enclosure.
The USB enclosure made nice with my spare DVD drive and let me put XP on my EEE which lets me do work things and have fun with Doom and Quake when I'm waiting at the car shop while my car gets its regular maintenance done.
If you don't have a spare copy of XP like I did then you'd have to fork out another $200 for it. Still.. thats a whole PC for something the size of this dumb terminal (It doesn't appear to be a complete system to me.)
If anything it'd be nice for exiting mobile device users but only if the price was like $100-200 I feel.. I wouldn't fork over $300-500 for it.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
People expect full versions of applications or at least the same level of functionality.
Eeepc gives you just that, full blown Linux applications (or Windows if you have to install it).
Powerful PDA's need to run Linux or Windows these days or at least have ports of popular Linux apps.
As a former Palm user, I've gotta agree. I was a Palm user back during the heady Palm V days, when Palm was undisputed king of PDAs. Definitely resting on their laurels was a huge factor. WinCE was adding multimedia features, had better resolution, and way better color support than PalmOS could handle. Syncing a WinCE device became easier and easier. Extending a WinCE device with external memory cards, add-ons like wireless adapters started happening. Palm just sat there. They added half-assed color support, but didn't really try very hard to make it catch on. People might not have known they even wanted to have color, but when offered the choice of WinCE with vibrant, deep-color displays and the vast majority of applications taking full advantage of the colorful display, the decision was obvious.
There was only one bright light for the Palm community, and that was Handspring. They were at least moving, and in the right direction. Palm gave them no support, and their means were limited as they did not control the OS. Eventually Palm bought them and they promptly stopped innovating. And that was pretty much the end of any hope that Palm would ever become the dominant PDA manufacturer again.
I have no idea what they were spending all that time doing, but whatever they were doing it clearly wasn't improving things in a tangible way for the vast, vast majority of users, and that's where they failed. It was like a hard drive manufacturer who instead of trying to increase the capacity of their drives, decided to stay with the same capacity and instead do things like increase power efficiency and reliability... Fine, and there's a niche for that, but if you're sitting in a majority position and decide to focus on a niche instead, that may not be the wisest of business choices unless you see some sort of massive reward in that niche. In Palm's case, whatever niche they saw, there was no reward there. And even if there were, there's a point where you will even fall out of your niche if you don't start paying attention to other areas of your business. I don't think anyone cares how reliable a hard drive is if it's only 10MB and I can now get 4GB solid state drives, or 1TB spinning disks.
Random and weird software I've written.
Correct, what Palm did this century was bad. I don't know what happened recently with PalmOS but by 2004 they were still having no real support for this great invention named folders, no practical multitasking, internet access was a joke, grainy resolution and washy colors in most devices and even though the hardware was much less powerful than WinCE/mobile devices the battery life was even worse usually. At the same time Windows Mobile devices were sporting brilliant screens, "real" support for the file system, multitasking, a reasonable IP stack and heck even Internet Explorer out of the box. A good 2004 windows mobile PDA has better display than the iphone, it is easily (~100$ and dropping) expandable to at least 32GB via CF cards, will run all good navigation programs, will play basically anything (including most reasonable divx/xvid movies DIRECTLY without conversion with the great tcpmp player), can read directly your USB stick or external USB hdd and of course it will connect to hotspots and run Internet Explorer/Opera mobile/skype and so on. Any 2004 palm device is just gathering dust now unless you have a very specific application for it.