- November 11, 2009 6:15 am
A couple weeks back we looked at the Redfly Dumb Terminal for BlackBerry. Almost immediately I wrote it off as utter garbage and as a poor attempt to make the idea of a “buddy device/companion” for gadgets better (or even useful at all.) Much as I thought, JK On the Run had a unit to test out and found the same thing to be true. The device suffered from extremely poor navigation problems brought on by the Redfly’s trackpad input as well as god awful screen rendering issues that caused the once crisp and clear Berry screen to look like absolute hell on the Redfly’s. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say that a software update could cure the rendering woes. The navigation issues seems more like a deeper fix though still possible with firmware alone.
Should you but it in hopes of software upgrades? No! At $250 with the problems highlighted above, this thing is crap. Do yourself a favor and stay away. JK goes on to say a previous model reviewed last year that was WinMo specific worked wonderfully. Brownie points I guess, but then there’s the whole issue of looking at WinMo in the first place. *Thinks for a minute….* Yuck.
**Sidenote: The image may not look bad at all but it’s resized, go to JK’s review below and look at the full size images and you’ll see how bad the screen looks…
Before we even start, I’ll just say one thing: FOLEO.
Looking at the Redfly Dumb Terminal for BlackBerry devices leaves me asking myself: Why? I guess we should tell you what it does. In short — not much. Essentially, the Redfly hooks up to your BlackBerry giving you a larger screen and keyboard to type on making hammering out emails and working on documents easier. Stop me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what Palm marketed the Foleo for? And we all know how well that went over. Smaller and lower powered than a laptop but too heavy, cumbersome, and “technologically dumb” make this less attractive than a netbook. Coupled with a $250 pricetag which is just shy of lower-end netbooks and laptops that can do much, much more means this thing is already dead.
Another sour point is that the display simply makes small, barely perceptible problems on your smartphone screen a larger and clearly more noticeable problem on the Redfly’s screen. The BlackBerry isn’t the only device that can make use of the Redfly Terminal mind you. Since all that is needed is a USB port and a small install of Redfly software, many smartphones can make use of this seemingly useless device.
Would you spend $250 on this device or pass it up for a more capable and usable netbook/laptop? As it stands now, this is for all intents and purposes a Palm Foles part 2. You would think after seeing the massive amounts of public disapproval after Palm announced the Foleo and ultimately failed would warn other companies to steer clear of these gimmicky failure prone “helper/companion devices”. We don’t want them. I guess Redfly missed that message. We’ll see how far this one gets…
Wired
