For the geeks out there, here are the slide decks from the presentations I did at last month’s PHP meetup:
My vision of the future of the desktop is becoming a reality. Allow me to introduce you to Redfly. From the pictures, it looks like a 7″ netbook, something along the lines of the EeePC 701 I sold earlier this year. But, it’s much less, and much more.
The specs say Redfly doesn’t have a CPU or OS, but let’s be realistic here for a moment. It has to have a CPU to do anything, and it needs an OS of some point to get booted up. What they mean, though, is that a booted-up Redfly is just going to sit there looking cheap and useless until you hook it up to your mobile phone. They currently support Windows Mobile, and I just read that a Blackberry version is in the works.
This device allows you to use your smartphone as a netbook, and even has a VGA connector with 800×600 support for showing presentations on a big screen or projector.
Can I just stop and rewind here for a second?
Almost every month, I do a Keynote (PowerPoint) presentation for the Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup. I sling my laptop and projector bags around my neck and shuffle my way into Panera Bread with all that weight on my neck and shoulders. With Redfly, I could toss my Blackberry in my pocket, toss the Redfly in the projector’s bag, and just carry one bag with me to give my presentation in Slideshow To Go.
It also supports a USB keyboard and mouse, and that’s where my vision comes in. Mobile devices are catching up to our desktops at a rapid pace, and their 16GB & 32GB capacities seem less paltry with much of our data living in “the cloud”. Notebooks recently started outselling desktops, and I think devices like Redfly will replace notebooks soon.
We’re nearing the day when our phones are immediate storage (our favorite songs and some misc. files), CPU, and RAM, and we just plug our phone into whatever dumb terminal we want to use — a notebook, desktop, media center, maybe even a server. Yes, a server — the ultimate blade!
What do you all think? Am I drinking too much of the mobile & cloud computing Kool-Aid? Leave your thoughts at csixty4.com.
Only got a minute, so here we go…