Remember the Palm Foleo? It was a product (or rather concept) that was met with general derision amongst technology journalists when it was announced, and Palm eventually responded by canning the project completely.

With the cascading torrent of mini laptops that has engulfed the PC Pro offices in the last few months, and the falling prices of laptops in general, you can see why. Palm was proposing to charge unwitting consumers around $499 (£255) for a laptop that allowed users to access the functions of their mobile phones and little more – yet you can buy an Eee PC with its own storage, OS and more processing power for less cash.

Well, someone clearly thought the idea wasn’t all bad – Celio’s Redfly Mobile Companion C8, which has just arrived in the Labs is clear evidence of that. But we can’t help wondering why it bothered.

It’s essentially a dumb terminal onto the Windows Mobile OS on your smartphone – with a larger 8in screen and reasonably good keyboard, decent build quality from what we can see … and not much else, bar a couple of USB sockets and a VGA output for connection to an external monitor.

There’s no onboard storage at all and precious little processing power – it’s literally a window onto your smartphone, either via a USB or Bluetooth connection. What you see on screen is Windows Mobile, writ large.

What’s the point, you may ask? Well you may be surprised to find that there are some. From initial tests, battery life is very impressive – in excess of 11 hours over Bluetooth connection – and you get the benefit of being able to browse the internet on a laptop-sized screen without having to find a hotspot, pay for a separate USB dongle or upgrade your data plan to allow you to use your phone as a tethered modem.

All this makes the Redfly an interesting aside, but is it a product anyone will consider buying? Perhaps when smartphones become more capable, but at the moment we can’t see many choosing it over one of the new generation of mini laptops.

Be sure to check back for a more in depth review in the very near future. You never know, our initial opinion may change…