Whoever said the PDA is dead obviously doesn’t travel much. Laptops are bulky, expensive, and overkill for many on-the-go tasks. Paired with a fold-up external keyboard, a PDA is more than enough for the peripatetic geek on a short hop from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Still, some folks chafe at the limited storage capacity of traditional PDAs, so we’re feeling bold enough to say that if the LifeDrive—with its integrated 4GB hard drive—is what you’ve been looking for, you’ll know it right away.

PalmOne cannily tuned the LifeDrive to appeal to weary pilgrims who are sick of carrying a laptop, MP3 player, and USB key everywhere they go. We’ve heard that from PalmOne before, but this time the company means it. In addition to the bodacious hard drive, the LifeDrive at last supports both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It’s bulkier and heavier than most PDAs—it’s almost an inch thick and weighs 6.8 ounces—nonetheless, the LifeDrive still looks the part with a fine silver finish and generously spaced programmable buttons.

The headphone jack is placed at the bottom of the device, which seems odd until you watch a video—you’ll never have to bat the headphone cord away. Video plays in both landscape and portrait mode, and there’s a handy button on the side for switching orientations. The 320x640 display is a welcome upgrade from previous PalmOne PDAs, but it still pales in comparison to Pocket PCs with full VGA screens; typical of all PDAs, the viewing angle is extremely limited.

The Home screen provides shortcuts to every conceivable PDA task, from document editing to video playback. It also gives you access to the Drive Mode, which allows the LifeDrive to act as a removable storage device that’s accessible by any PC or Mac. And as we’ve come to expect from the Palm OS, basics such as e-mail and file synchronization are handled deftly and with a minimum of fuss (the LifeDrive even includes idiot-proof VPN support).

Despite the snappy Intel 416MHz Intel XScale processor, the LifeDrive’s performance is unimpressive. Horrible lag plagues every aspect of the device. You’ll have to wait several seconds after pressing a button to see any results. This isn’t a major drawback if you don’t switch tasks often, but we do—and we were extremely annoyed. Browsing the web from a Wi-Fi connection was painfully slow for us, as well, far behind the load time of any other PDA we’ve used this year. And don’t even think about doing more than one task at a time on the LifeDrive. Not only does launching an application while listening to an MP3 make playback stutter, but so much as pressing a LifeDrive button—to go to the Home screen—results in a punishing crackle in your headphones. The LifeDrive can play some MPEG-4 videos, but it’s very picky about how files are encoded; most of the time, you’ll need to allow Palm Desktop to transcode your video for viewing on the device.

The LifeDrive runs PalmOS 5.4, which is showing its age and losing its ease-of-use edge over the Windows Mobile platform, especially when we factor in the craptastic button response. As for the battery life... well, you’ll want to keep your charger handy. We got 2:10 (hours:minutes) of continuous video playback before it pooped out. In frequent but noncontinuous use throughout the day, our test LifeDrive made it a day and a half before we ran outta juice.

At $500, the LifeDrive isn’t an impulse buy. Although the integrated hard drive is a sexy, bold step forward for PDAs, the firmware needs heavy polishing if PalmOne wants to attract the attention of the LifeDrive’s potential audience.
—Logan Decker

PALM TREES: 4GB internal hard drive, useful Drive Mode, and effortless e-mail and file sync.

PALM READERS: Creaky OS, extremely sluggish, and cannot effectively multitask.

Month Reviewed: August 2005
Verdict: 7
URL: www.palmone.com

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