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PDA pioneer palmOne today announced what it asserts is a new type of portable device, the Mobile Manager. The product category should join the company's smartphones (Treo) and handhelds (Zire & Tungsten) with the introduction of the first model later this month.

PalmOne says the development of Mobile Managers reflect customer usage patterns it tracked over time. The vendor determined handhelds attract those whose main interest is basic organization tools, such as calendar and contacts. These customers often incorporate additional applications and add music and images to their handhelds, but that’s not their central purchase driver.

Smartphones are for those primarily interested in a single converged device for phone, e-mail access and organization, of course.

Mobile Managers, on the other hand, are basically handhelds on steroids. The aim is for the company to take advantage of the trend towards 'digital everything.' To palmOne, that means a device that can deal with many different types of files—documents and e-mail to music, images and video—standalone or organized into folders.

As palmOne VP of marketing Page Murray says, "Some people want to carry dozens of documents and hundreds of songs while others want to carry a thousand-plus photos and enjoy videos."

Murray declared, "We listened and will deliver a new category of mobile-computing product that will let customers fuse their own mix of personal and business content in ways never before possible in either handheld computers or smartphones."

Mobile managers sound a lot like handhelds to us: Particularly powerful types of PDAs, but handhelds nevertheless.

Rumors and leaks over the last couple of months paint a detailed picture of what should be the first palmOne Mobile Manager, LifeDrive. If they’re accurate, the device will be the company's most revolutionary 'handheld' in a long time.

PalmOne did not mention LifeDrive in its announcement. It often reveals new product categories a month or so before officially introducing the first device in its class. This happened with the Zire and Tungsten PDA lines, for example.

LifeDrive
LifeDrive should be the first palmOne device in years to integrate Wi-Fi, which is nowadays standard in most other manufacturers mid to high-end handhelds.

Not standard to other company's devices is the Mobile Manager's 4-gigabyte hard disk drive. Most likely this feature is what palmOne refers to when it speaks of the new category's extensive personal and business file-management capabilities.

The large amount of storage moves LifeDrive into Apple iPOD and personal media player territory, in particular. These latter devices go way beyond the capabilities of an MP3 player, a PDA or any other familiar type of handheld in mobilizing nearly every type of media format.

In addition to a lot of storage (often far more than the 4 gigabytes) they include high quality LCD color displays. So you can play video and view pictures in addition to listening to music. Some even let you record television programming so you can watch your favorite show on a plane or during that long commute to work, for example.

Examples of portable media players are the Creative Labs Zen Portable Media Center, Archos' Gmini400, and iRiver's PMP-100 series.

Additional rumored LifeDrive features include:

416MHz Intel Bulverde processor

64 MB of RAM (57 MB user accessible

USB 2.0

Bluetooth 1.1

480 x 320 TFT display at 18-bit color

Palm OS Garnet

Secure Digital Slot for memory and peripheral expansion

Virtual Graffiti 2 character-entry area

Five-way navigation control

Rectangular group of software activation buttons

Rumors say the LifeDrive will sell for $500.

PalmOne's Place
Gartner recently reported that palmOne fell to second place behind Research In Motion for PDA sales during the first quarter of 2005. BlackBerry shipments grew 75.6 percent, giving it 20.8 percent of the market, while palmOne's PDA shipments declined 26.3 percent, reducing its share to 18 percent—the company's lowest percentage since 1996.

Unlike some competitors, Gartner lumps all devices that aren't physically similar to a standard cell phone (think Treo) as a PDA. So that's why cellular-wireless handhelds like the BlackBerry or Nokia's (fourth place) new 9300 and 9500 communicators are included in its data.

We generally consider these types of devices as types of smartphones, as you can make phone calls from them in addition to performing other types of other data exchange and PDA functions. When you look at the market that way, palmOne is still tops when it comes to PDAs, barely.

A couple of week back, Gartner rival Canalys, for example, released statistics for what it calls the Smart Device market, which combines PDAs and smartphones. Nokia dominated during the first quarter with its Symbian-based smartphones and communicators, while palmOne edged out RIM in total shipments for a distant second with its PDAs and smartphones.

Although palmOne's position varies depending on how a research firm defines the mobile device market, one thing is certain: its total share of the market has declined over recent quarters.

Under Canalys, for instance, palmOne's Treo series of smartphones grew by 17 percent, while its PDA shipments declined by 27 percent. The result is a net increase of Smart Device shipments for first quarter 2004 of a mere 1 percent and a drop to only 9.4 percent share of the market for palmOne.

BlackBerry shipments, by comparison, doubled year-over-year.

It's not clear whether releasing a new line of high storage 'handhelds' in the Mobile Manager series will stem the tide for palmOne when all indications point toward smartphones leading the way towards the future. Portable media players, by comparison, while increasing in popularity, fall way behind MP3 players in the mobile media device market.