Palm Boulevard: News: LifeDrive: PalmOne Debuts 4-Gigabyte Gamble

After months of rumors and speculation, palmOne today introduced one of the worst kept secrets in the handheld industry, LifeDrive. This powerful new handheld is the PDA pioneer�s bid to open itself up to a whole new class of user and get back on the cutting edge of mobile device development.

LifeDrive features a 4-gigabyte (GB) Hitachi Microdrive, a high-resolution screen, and Bluetooth 1.1 personal area networking. It is also (somewhat remarkably) the first palmOne handheld in years, since the Tungsten C, to integrate Wi-Fi wireless networking.

Out of LifeDrive's 4 GB of hard disk storage, about 3.85 GB is available to the user. The Hitachi Microdrive used in the handheld is supposed to be 30 percent faster than previous editions of the tiny, matchbook-size hard disk. LifeDrive's display, at 320 x 480 pixels, is the same resolution as other recent palmOne devices, such as the Tungsten T3 and Tungsten T5.

A Mobile Manager
LifeDrive is the initial member of a new category of mobile device from the PDA pioneer, the Mobile Manager, which joins the company's existing Zire & Tungsten handheld and Treo smartphone lines.

PalmOne asserts Mobile Managers ability to store, effortlessly sync, and integrate a much larger number and wider type of file separates them from its other types of devices. With LifeDrive, you can entertain yourself, share and carry personalized content�photos, home movies or an entire MP3 collection, for example�and mobilize virtually all of your essential desktop computer files and folders.

All That Space
Unlike hard disk-based MP3 players (e.g. Apple's iPod) or portable media players from vendors like Creative and Archos that can hold ten times as much or more information as LifeDrive, palmOne's new device is capable of carrying and working with numerous file types simultaneously. So a single LifeDrive, for example, may handle:

1,200 office documents

6,000 e-mails

1,000 photos

300 songs

2.5 hours of video

50 voicemails

10,000 contacts

10,000 appointments

Software
Four applications are key to LifeDrive:

Folder Sync, which automatically updates selected files when syncing; File Transfer, for dragging and dropping files from a PC onto the Mobile Manager; Drive Mode, to enable the device to behave like a USB drive for easy file transfers to any PC or Mac; and Files View, to maintain a transferred folder structure on the handheld. This last feature purports to make it simpler to locate important information.

DataViz Documents To Go lets you work with native Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat Reader files. Of course, there's also the standard Palm platform personal information management applications plus the VersaMail e-mail client (for POP, IMAP and Exchange accounts) and a Web browser.

Entertainment/Multimedia
With LifeDrive's high-resolution display, you can view documents in both portrait (vertical) and landscape (horizontal) modes, and play back video using the whole screen. The full 3.85 GB Microdrive holds up to 8.5 hours of video, depending on how you encode the movie.

The Mobile Manager is palmOne's first device in a long time not to bundle Real Networks' RealPlayer. Instead, it comes with an application called Pocket Tunes from NormSoft. In addition to supporting several popular mobile music formats (i.e. MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV files), Pocket Tunes is compatible with Real Networks' Rhapsody music streaming subscription service. Consequently, a million plus songs and three scores worth of radio channels are available to the LifeDrive user. The device comes with a free 30-day Rhapsody trial.

During the conference call introducing LifeDrive to the press, palmOne spent a lot of time touting an application called Camera Companion. This software lets users stick their digital camera's Secure Digital (SD) card into the Mobile Manager's SD slot and easily transfer images to the device's Microdrive. For those with digital cameras that don't support SD cards, a separate peripheral will be available. You plug your camera into the add-on and then wirelessly transfer its pictures to LifeDrive.

Although it offers these image integration features, we find it surprising that a device that touts personal and business synergy and multimedia doesn't supply its own digital camera, even a basic VGA type for convenience sake.

More Specs
Additional LifeDrive specifications include:

416 MHz XScale processor

65.2 MB of RAM for running the applications stored on the hard drive

USB 2.0 for fast file transfers

Virtual Graffiti 2 character-entry area

Five-way navigation control

Rectangular group of software activation buttons

While the 4.76 x 2.87 x 0.74 inch LifeDrive is smaller lengthwise than the Tungsten T5, it is a bit thicker and, at 6.8 ounces, heavier. With an integrated voice recorder with activation button, LifeDrive has something other recent palmOne handhelds like the professional and business orientated Tungsten T5 did not.

There's also a 1600 mAH Lithium Ion battery that isn't swappable. You would expect a multimedia heavy device with a power hungry largish screen and hard drive would let you change batteries.

Cost
PalmOne prices LifeDrive at $499, about the same a device with only 16 MB of memory cost just a few years ago. You can order the Mobile Manager now, but quantities are limited. It should be available in volume by the beginning of June.

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