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Can REDFLY sell in an EeePC market?

Posted by Zonk on from the how-it-feels-to-be-a-fembot-living-in-a-manbot's-manputer's-world dept.

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?"

13 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. well by stoolpigeon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    it costs more than the eee pc and has less funtionality. I'm thinking no. As someone who has a windows mobile phone provided by my employer let me just say that they suck. They are slow, buggy and make for a terrible phone and a nearly as bad pda. How they ever came to be more prevalent than palm - I don't know- the ease of using with exchange maybe? I really don't know because everyone I know who has one (my whole team of 9 people and many others in my department) hates it. The company provides them so we use them, but seriously - they are awful. So spending 500 bucks to get a little bit bigger screen and keyboard doesn't really sound like a great idea to me.

    --
    It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
    1. Re:well by stoolpigeon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have a Sprint ppc-6700. Windows mobile 5, 128 meg of sdram and I've got a 2 gig mini sd card in it. Battery life sucks. I'm lucky to get 8 hours out of it, if I don't talk to anyone. Waiting for apps to load is painfully slow. I have to 'reboot' it more than once a day. More than once I've had an inbound call, I'm clicking the button to take it over and over but the phone is hung up - need to reboot and call them back.

      The phone itself is junk but I'm trying to focus primarily on the problems with windows mobile. Prior to this I was a palm user and had become accustomed to a snappy, quick experience from a pda. I was also not used to things crashing all the time.

      evdo is nice - it is easy to develop with VS. I like MS Reader. But it sucks to use without a stylus, almost always requires using both hands - even to make calls and is unreliable to the point that I often want to toss it.

      --
      It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
    2. Re:well by Lumpy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's the implementation. I though the same about Windows mobile phones. until I got my current Samsung Blackjack.

      I recently upgraded it from WM5 to WM6 and it's fast, stable and works well. It seems the smartphone edition of WM5 and WM6 works better than the touchscreen enabled version.

      I even like it WAY better than the Windows Mobile Treo and palm Treo. It's all in the hardware being designed for the software it runs.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    3. Re:well by hey! · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Having worked in the field, I have a slightly different perspective.

      It was never the case that slow hardware plagued Microsoft's PDA offerings. The problem is that the use-case models (if there were any) for the Pocket PC user interface were absurd. They have a kind of "desktop replacement" mentality; yet to the degree something is convenient to carry in your pocket, it is awkward as a general purpose computing device (with an interface mimicking a desktop no less). And vice versa.

      It is the badness of the Windows Mobile interfaces, coupled with the excessive bulk of the early WinCE PDAs that made them crap. It was a cascade of bad consequences, all starting with the attempt to be good at everything: to give a desktop-y kind of experience, you needed lots of pixels, and those pixels had to be color and they had to come cheap, so you ended up with a large device with a big honking battery to drive the backlight through the cheap lcd. It's the hi-res displays and the high capacity batteries that make modern Windows Mobile PDAs tolerable. Not the CPU speed.

      Palm, in its heyday, created a niche product that was convenient to carry, and performed in a few limited roles very well. Think about this: that very same description also fits Apple's iPod. Now, there were people like me who exploited the fact that Palm was a platform, and made a nice living off it for a while. We could define new roles for the device.

      It is true Palm made some mistakes, but the idea that they failed to make a spiffy enough OS is a myth. The real problem is that the PDA niche became unprofitable as prices dropped. Most who had a Palm V would probably be happy with one today -- if it cost about $35. But that's not the kind of thing Palm sells; they sell stuff in the 200-$500 range. So, they began to add spiffiness to their products, spiffiness that their users neither needed, nor wanted, but was mandated by the price range they wanted to occupy. So they blurred the distinction between PalmOS and PocketPC by becoming more PocketPC like.

      In the end, it was not so much a case of Palm moving too slowly, as not having a very good place to move towards, other than into smart phones.

      In smart phones, business friendliness continues to be a weak spot for Palm and a marketing strength for Microsoft. But Microsoft isn't as dominant as people here seem to think. It is the carriers rule the smart phone market, not Microsoft. I see the smart phone as only an interim solution, not because PDA functions need to be liberated from a phone, but vice versa. We're in a state of incredible flux at present, with categories of mobile devices multiplying rapidly, and the boundaries of those categories being very fuzzy.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  2. If it can run Linux w. Compiz? by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If it can run Linux with Compiz, possibly. Here is an ASUS eee (eeePC) with Linux running Compiz http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biRzKj3XxCY with graphics far more impressive than anything Vista can ever achieve, with or without Service Pack 1 (SP1). That VideoTube link shows an eee (eeepc) link running graphics super and more user friendly than Vista. OK, you can have the ASUS eee with the old-fashioned XP (i.e. yesterday's version), but then you have to Pay MORE THAN $100!!! Go figure what is the best choice for you...

  3. Seen it, not very impressed by stuporglue · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Colin Cook (CTO of Celio, makers of Redfly) came to speak to our Information Technology guest lecture class at BYU, so I've seen this thing in action.

    I asked them about computers like the EEE PC and there was a definite brief look of worry, then he claimed that people didn't want to carry around a whole extra computer, and that by being able to keep the PDA on your person, the Redfly would be more secure than a laptop which you might leave in a bag or briefcase. He also said that the target customer (Windows PDA users) wouldn't want to buy an EEE PC because it had Linux on it.

    He also seemed to get slightly flustered when I informed him that you could buy EEE PCs with Windows on them.

    I think that when they started working on this project, there was a need and a market for it, but now that it's almost ready their market has disappeared because functional affordable UMPCs are finally on the market. That said, it was kind of neat, but not $500 neat. Maybe PDA accessory neat($50-$100).

    --
    https://www.facebook.com/digitizeicm -- Show your support for the digitization of the Iron County Miner newspaper archiv
  4. Have an eeePC device by baggins2001 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have loaded my eeePC device with a Web Server and 2 databases and use if for development work on the road and keeping up with emails. I just don't see that a keyboard and screen that plug into a PDA are going to compete with that. This has way more functionality than my PDA and is a great cross between a laptop and PDA. Sorry Matthew it's no contest.
    Plus are you going to sit on a train juggling a display, a keyboard, a mouse, and a PDA.

    --
    He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
  5. Re:Or... by GreggBz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I doubt it. It's selling like bloody hotcakes. Newegg can't keep them on the shelves.

    Why do you think we are starting to see similar devices?

    I think the market was ripe for such a thing, particularly at these price points. I know I "had to have" mine, and for $379USD am loving every minute of it.

    Now, Windows mobile could be a nice somewhat lean OS for the thing, and I'd find this REDFLY pretty good if it was a little sleeker and more refined then my eeePC. I would prefer the Linux though because I'm a big Linux geek and it offers very much flexibility.

  6. No. 'nuff said. by alcmaeon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Lame idea. Lame implementation. Expensive. Glad I'm not an investor in their company.

  7. That explains it. by Mactrope · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Cellular carriers, you mean ATT - that little company that did not want people using 300 baud modems? That would explain everthing about the US market but iPhone. Even iPhone is understandable when you hear about multiple thousand dollar "data" bills.

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    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
  8. Pointless device, poor product targeting by billcopc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I can see the appeal of the EEE PC, because it's small, cheap, and PC compatible. You can even load Windows on there if you're so motivated. From design to application, it's a mini-laptop.

    Redfly is small-ish, but it's not cheap, and it runs Windows Mobile. That makes it a bastard PDA, and the industry has proven time and time again that PDAs suck, and PDA phones are just bulky overpriced phones with crap features. No love.

    At $500, it's within kicking distance of many cheap full-featured laptops from ECS and Acer, even Dell! If you really want to be a road warrior and get some work done on the bus, you don't want an oversized Blackberry, you want a real laptop! With a real keyboard, real apps and 100% compatibility with your existing software investment and infrastructure. The hardware is peanuts these days, it's all about the software.

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com
  9. Yep by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Palm made the often fatal mistake of resting on their laurels because they were the top dog. This is a bad idea in business in general, but a particular bad idea if Microsoft is after your market. For whatever else you want to say about Microsoft, they are highly tenacious. If they believe there is a market they can compete in, they just keep trying. Many companies will roll out an unsuccessful product and go "Oh well, guess we can't compete," and pack up and leave that market alone. MS doesn't do that, they ask "What do we need to fix?" and then try again, and again, and again.

    So sure, when Windows CE first came out, I can see how Palm thought it was laughable because it was. The problem comes from assuming that is all MS will ever put out. Well, no. With each version they learned more about what they needed to do. Pretty soon CE had surpassed PalmOS and Palm was scrambling to catch up.

    In business in general you can't just sit stagnant and assume nobody will surpass you, but when MS enters the market that is particularly true. They have numerous times released a product that was quite poor in its first version, only to continue to refine it to the point that it surpasses it's competition.

  10. It's a Trojan by giafly · · Score: 2, Interesting
    This is one of those rare occasions where a company deliberately sabotages their own flagship product
    1. If implemented as written, OOXML will massively increase the "attack surface" of Office
    2. Microsoft must actually try and implement it, or face anti-trust complaints.
    3. It will become a target of choice for botnets and virusses.
    4. And they will have to kill it. Only question is, "How Soon"?
    --
    Reduce, reuse, cycle