Press Releases
Jul 9, 2009Salt Lake City's Celio makes your smart phone a computer, too
Smart cell phones are getting smarter, faster and more powerful, with a plethora of applications available to run on them. It's almost like you don't need a laptop anymore -- almost.
It's in that "almost" that Salt Lake City-based Celio Corp. sees its opportunity.
The big trouble with those powerful smart phones is that they have small screens and tiny keyboards, making it difficult if not impossible to use for many tasks such as typing in a bunch of words or viewing a spreadsheet.
To take advantage of the phones' computing powers and to overcome its handicaps, Celio designed and is marketing what essentially is a screen and a keyboard you can use with a smart phone that makes the phone act much like a laptop with ready access to the Internet.
The company's Redfly Smart-Phone Terminals have 7- or 8-inch screens and like-sized keyboards. It relies on the smart phones' computing power and has no central processing unit or operating system. That makes it both lighter and cheaper.
"It makes the smart phone the center of the computing experience," said CEO and President Kirt Bailey.
Celio aims its terminals at businesses, though it also sells them retail. The company just lowered its prices, saying increased production had allowed it to cut costs. The 8-inch Redfly with an eight-hour battery charge sells for $249, while the 7-inch screen with a five-hour battery goes for $199.
But why not go with a laptop or even the new mobile laptops called netbooks and their built in computing powers? Generally the answer is cost and mobility.
Maj. Jim Harvey, technology manager for the Memphis, Tenn., Police Department, had equipped officers with Verizon 6700 smart phones from which they were to file arrest reports and other paperwork, saving them the time of going into the office.
"We got some complaints. I wouldn't say a lot of complaints, but three or four from officers who said they were getting headaches from trying to view the screen on the PDA," he said. "I had a couple who even brought in doctors notes saying they couldn't use them. They wanted to keep writing paper reports."
So Harvey began to look around for solutions. He was looking for foldout keyboards when he came upon the Redfly. He asked for one, tested it, then ordered 1,200.
The solution cost considerably less than a laptop.
"With a regular-sized laptop, you're talking probably $4,000 to $6,000 per vehicle," Harvey said, with addition logistical problems like brackets to carry the devices in a vehicle and the need for a wireless card that would cost around $50 a month. With cell phones, the cost of the wireless access is already there and the Redfly allows it to operate a lot like a full-size computer.
Celio Corp. got its start in January of 2007 after Bailey, then working in Intel's investment division, heard from a friend at vSpring Capital about technology that would connect a screen and keyboard to a smart phone and use that device's computing power. The friend introduced the developer, Colin Cook, to Bailey. Cook now serves as chief technical officer at Celio.
Celio sees its main market among businesses that have made a decision to use smart phones as a work tool for a mobile work force.
"From an IT perspective, they've made a decision to deploy only one platform," said Bailey. "They don't want to deploy a notebook platform and a smart phone platform, because they are running an application and they don't want to have the total cost of two platforms."
For those businesses that already have paid for smart phones for their work force, the Redfly represents a better return on assets, said Frank Bernhard, technology economist and managing principal of the telecommunications practice at the OMNI Consulting Group of Davis, Calif.
"Every corporation that invested in smart phone technology has to be able to eke more out from those devices rather than dispose of them or duplicate them or so on," he said. "So I think the real genius behind what Redfly is doing is to enable the asset they already have to give them more, do more for them."
The Redfly might look like netbooks and even laptops. But Philippe Winthrop, director of business mobility solutions at Strategy Analytics of Massachusetts, said there is no direct comparison.
"The beauty of what the Redfly does, and this is so incredibly powerful, is it allows you to leverage every application, including e-mail, that you've got on your mobile and that's huge. And nobody is doing this," said Winthrop, who joined Celio's advisory board after seeing a demonstration of the Redfly.
Redfly now works on Windows Mobile-based smart phones but expects by the end of the year to support BlackBerrys and phones running the Android operating system from Google. But there's been no response from Apple about Celio's desire to make Redfly work on an iPhone. Rumors reported in news articles and blogs say Apple is working to make a large screen iPod Touch with a bigger screen that is its response to the netbook phenomenon.
By Tom Harvey
The Salt Lake Tribune