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?"

Comments

well

[stoolpigeon]

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.

Re:well

[AKAImBatman]

How they ever came to be more prevalent than palm - I don't know- the ease of using with exchange maybe?

I think it has more to do with a lack of updates from Palm. They effectively stood still for so long that hardware finally reached a point where WinCE could be run at a reasonable speed. When device makers looked at the (non-existent) multimedia features of PalmOS and the (competent) multimedia features of WinCE, they chose WinCE almost by default.

Now if Cobalt had been pushed out the door, maybe things would have been different. But instead, Cobalt sits on the shelf with not a single device maker using it. Not even Palm hardware.

Re:well

[Alex Belits]

You don't market phone OS to users -- you market it to cellular carriers.

Re:well

[BUL2294]

it costs more than the eee pc and has less funtionality. I'm thinking no.

I agree. Such a machine ties me to WinCE, which means stripped-down versions of .NET, SQL Server, IE, MS-Office--and nothing else. USB support will be limited to the 5 devices that WinCE supports out of the box. (Who writes WinCE USB drivers for their devices?)

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...

Re:well

[stoolpigeon]

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.

Re:well

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:well

[hey!]

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.

Re:well

[Cecil]

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.

Re:well

[itsme1234]

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.

Beavis and Butthead

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am Palm Foleo. I need TP for my bum hole."

If it can run Linux w. Compiz?

[G3ckoG33k]

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...

Re:If it can run Linux w. Compiz?

[Aetuneo]

As someone with an Eee which can run Compiz (I installed it yesterday), I have the following comments to make:
1. It kills the battery life.
2. It's actually not that useful. No more user friendly than eeeXubuntu is, and, like I said, the decreased batter life prevents it from being that viable.
3. Shininess does not create usability.
4. The Eee is great, can't argue with that.
5. You are a bit too excited about this, and your grammar has suffered. It should be "then you have to pay more than $100 extra," not "then you have to Pay MORE THAN $100!!!"
6. Using more than one exclaimation mark makes people think that you are insane. It makes people pay attention for the same reason that people pay attention to the crazy people on the street - if you don't, they might stab you.

Re:Or...

[stoolpigeon]

I doubt it. If you read this article on Asustek you will find things like, "Since the Eee PC hit store shelves last fall, sales have been strong. Between October and the end of the year, Asustek sold more than 300,000 Eee PCs, and executives say they expect to sell between 3.5 million and 5 million this year."

I've seen a number of them out and about - I don't think they can fail by any sane measurement, as they have already succeeded by most.

Seen it, not very impressed

[stuporglue]

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).

Re:Seen it, not very impressed

[MichaelSmith]

I am hopping that the anti Linux feelings will soon be a thing of the past.

Maybe we can get Barack Obama to do a speech about it.

Have an eeePC device

[baggins2001]

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.

Re:Or...

[snl2587]

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.

Re:Or...

[GreggBz]

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.

No. 'nuff said.

[alcmaeon]

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

That explains it.

[Mactrope]

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.

Re:That explains it.

[blueZ3]

I don't like AT&T that much, but I do have an iPhone with them and the data plan is $20 a month for unlimited EDGE. Not sure where the

multiple thousand dollar "data" bills

idea came from, but I don't think that's the way iPhone contracts work.

Attention EEE PC competitors

[British]

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?

I think...

[CFBMoo1]

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.

Pointless device, poor product targeting

[billcopc]

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.

Re:Or...

[Rob the Bold]

Also, it fits in a handbag (or purse, if you're American)-

Or a man-bag, if you're a man -- or a murse, if you're an American man.

Yep

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

It's a Trojan

[giafly]

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"?

Nope! People want full applications

[gilesjuk]

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.

Re:and "slamming"

[DeepZenPill]

The "unlimited" EDGE plan was created in response to a lot of bad press about huge bills.

This is not true, if in reference to the iPhone plan. There are 3 tiers of service for iPhone users, all of which have unlimited EDGE and always have.