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PalmOne (soon to be Palm Inc. again) needed something to bring a little buzz back to the platform. Not so many years ago—but an eternity in Internet time—PalmPilot and then Palm organizers were the hottest gadgets going.

The Filofax years turned into the Palm years as people could now effectively manage their calendars while on the go.

But something happened as gadgets started multiplying in our pockets and bags: Windows, Symbian, and Blackberry devices started stealing the Palm's business audience, while casual users found that portable music players and cell phones filled their gadget quota. PalmOne was still turning out excellent devices, but they weren't getting the same reaction as before.


PalmOne LifeDrive, Front View

The time is right, then, for palmOne to create a new category of device called Mobile Managers, which marry the calendar and contact usefulness of a handheld organizer with the massive hard drive of a music player. The first such device, the PalmOne LifeDrive, can run any Palm OS application, play video or audio files you download from your computer, and store files, such as those for Word, Excel and PowerPoint—viewable and editable with Dataviz Documents To Go.


Manage Microsoft Office Files

It gets the connection tools right too with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth—the first palmOne handheld to include both wireless technologies and the only one of its handhelds since the Tungsten C (introduced a few years ago) to integrate Wi-Fi— and a nifty software package.


Virtual Graffiti

While LifeDrive has some drawbacks—the $499 price is steep, the audio player can only handle MP3s, the battery needs to be charged every few days, and it lacks a built-in camera—we still think it's an exciting addition to the handheld space.

Design
LifeDrive is larger and heavier than the average Palm platform device, but not so much that it's a burden. It measures 4.76 x 2.87 x 0.74 inches and weighs in at 6.8 ounces.

Thanks to the rounded corners on its rear, it fits well in the hand. A silver finish gives LifeDrive an attractive look that's both stylish and business-friendly.


Rear View

We like that while LifeDrive has several buttons built into it, we never found ourselves pressing the wrong one by accident, as with other handhelds. The top offers the power switch, which you can also put into the locked position to prevent LifeDrive from turning on in your bag and wasting battery life.


Top View

Next to this you'll find the stylus in its familiar right-hand spot. The LifeDrive doesn't ship with an extra stylus, so hold onto it. The top also has Secure Digital (SD) card slot for memory and peripheral expansion. PalmOne makes the slot a whole lot more useful than normal with the built-in photo import software (more on that later).

The left side offers a voice recorder button at the top, in the usual spot for making quick thumb-operated recordings, and a screen orientation button lower down for shifting the screen ninety degrees. It's handy to be able to rotate the screen quickly, especially when viewing Web pages.



Side View

The front of LifeDrive offers four application buttons set around a five-way navigation button. The four call up the home directory, the file browser, stored photos, and the music player. (A star marks this last button, so you can customize it for whatever app you call up most often.) These sit just below an impressively large 320 by 480 pixel Transflective TFT color touchscreen, which supports over 65,000 colors.


Interface

The LifeDrive has a speaker built into its back, but the sound is thin and tinny. Instead, plug a standard pair of earphones or earbuds into the audio jack, which (for some reason) is awkwardly placed on the bottom of the handheld.

If LifeDrive feels like an overdue invention, at least palmOne has used that time to get it right. The handheld's Wi-Fi (802.11b) and Bluetooth (1.1) features are both easy to turn on with buttons on the lower part of the screen.


Wireless

Both can even run at the same time. Looking for and connecting to an available wireless network takes only seconds. Bluetooth has a 30-foot range, and connects easily to most Bluetooth phones.

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