Photo from Gizomodo*
Celio Corporation has developed a remote display system so you can send the screen of your Windows Mobile phone to a bigger display. It's available for licensing.
Now Gizmodo has a photo showing a Redfly Mobile Companion ($499), which provides just such a display, along with a keyboard. What else it provides remains a mystery, but Gizmodo compares it to the Palm Foleo, which was discontinued before it was launched.
It will be unveiled at next week's CES so I'll try to track it down and see....
As well as Palm's failure, Microsoft proved unable to get Mobile Companion computers to sell a decade ago, and five years ago, Microsoft's Mira project -- like Redfly, but providing a remote display for Windows PCs -- also flopped. So the omens don't sound good.
Actually, there's no reason why you can't plug a standard PC keyboard and monitor into a Windows Mobile phone, if the phone supplier provides the sockets or a suitable accessory. Toshiba tried that five years ago with the e740 Pocket PC, and I liked the idea (Super PDA could replace the PC). That also failed to take off.....
The ability to operate a mobile phone from a standard Windows laptop might be useful, but it gets less interesting every day, as Wi-Fi becomes more and more widely available.
* but I've reduced it from 218K to 37K. Am I behind the times or does size still matter?
