palmOne LifeDrive

The first PDA on the U.S. market with a hard drive, the palmOne LifeDrive ($499 direct) is a device that digital pack rats should love. In fact, the folks at palmOne consider it a mobile manager, one of an entirely new class of handheld products. Its 4GBs of storage should be enough for almost anyone to carry all their critical documents and media. Be forewarned, though: You'll have to recharge the device frequently, and we did encounter some irritating bugs and crashes during our testing, which prevented us from awarding it even higher marks and an Editors' Choice.

Even so it's a cool new device for the gadget fanatic who wants to do a bit of everything on a regular basis, whether play a movie, game, or music, pull up photos, do some tolerable Web surfing, view or work on the occasional Office document, or look up an address. It's the first device we've seen that can actually handle all these tasks, even if it's not the best at any one in particular.

Boxy yet sleek, the LifeDrive looks like something designed by Porsche. It measures 4.8 by 2.9 by 0.7 inches, weighs 6.8 ounces, and accommodates a huge 320-by-480 screen and a 4GB Hitachi 3K4 Microdrive. It's not actually longer or wider than many other PDAs, but it's deeper. Holes on the back help vent the drive's heat; the LifeDrive gets a little warm, but never uncomfortably so.

The LifeDrive is designed to hold all your portable files; we filled ours with 600 MB of MP3s, a full-length movie, and a flotilla of review notes, and it was still more than half empty. (Program files must live in 64MB of RAM, but that's plenty of room for Palm OS software, which is generally pretty compact.) There's a slew of ways to get your files on and off the device, too: You can beam them over Bluetooth, drop them in via SD Card, share them using built-in 802.11b Wi-Fi, sync them from a PC with included software, or just plug the LifeDrive via USB 2.0 into any PC or Mac, where it becomes an external drive without you having to add any additional software.

PalmOne marries the LifeDrive's massive storage to a very usable set of software. You'll find DataViz DocumentsToGo 7, still the best Microsoft Office document reader/editor suite on any handheld, loaded on the product. The LifeDrive also comes with Pocket Tunes, an MP3/WMA player that supports playlists and syncs with Windows Media Player 10; a basic built-in video player; and WiFile, a sleek interface for downloading files from SMB shared drives over Wi-Fi, which we used with both PCs and Macs. Speaking of Wi-Fi, palmOne's implementation is far smoother than Microsoft's in Windows Mobile 2003 SE—you can access any available network in a few clicks.

PalmOne's Blazer browser is decent enough, allowing you to browse the Web over Wi-Fi or via a Bluetooth mobile phone connection. Web pages also look better on Blazer than they do when viewed on Pocket PCs using Pocket Explorer, with more accurate rendering of graphics and tables, though poorer frame support. Page rendering was a bit slower than we would have liked; the LifeDrive took 4, 20, and 62 seconds to render a sequence of simple, more complex, and very complex pages, whereas the 624-MHz Dell Axim X50v Pocket PC took 2, 15, and 42 seconds.

On the desktop, Palm Desktop and palmOne's Outlook connectors are newly joined by LifeDrive Manager, which lets you sync folders between your PC and PDA. Palm Desktop automatically transcodes the most popular unprotected video formats into the right size and speed for the handheld, which we realized when reviewing palmOne's Tungsten T5 and Tungsten E2. We tried MPEG1, MPEG2 and DivX files, which became full-screen MPEG4 movies at a smooth, viewable 18 frames per second. Even Mac users get some love: Although LifeDrive Manager and video transcoding don't work with Macs, you can use Palm Desktop to sync PIM data and Drive Mode to transfer files. But there remains no support for copy-protected music or video files.

We did run into several minor, annoying bugs during our testing. For instance, LifeDrive Manager crashed one of our test PCs, and we managed to crash both Pocket Tunes and the USB Drive Mode application on the handheld. Audio in the popular Palm OS–based game, Bejeweled 2, which we downloaded for testing, was often choppy. Also, some Web pages would mysteriously pause in midload for up to a minute. And Palm OS 5, which wasn't designed for multimedia, is starting to look long in the tooth. There's no system-wide volume slider, it's difficult to interrupt Web page loads in progress, and forget about running things in the background (though Pocket Tunes valiantly tries)—this is a one-thing-at-a-time machine.

Battery life is relatively short and most likely suffers due to the hard drive and the use of Wi-Fi. With Wi-Fi off, we got a little over 4 hours of PDA usage time and 3 hours of video playback. That's about half the battery life of the mid-range E2. Turning on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth dragged life down to about two and a half hours. You'll need to charge this lovely little power hog every other day or so. Fortunately, charging goes fast (zero to 95 percent in around 90 minutes) and the nonperishable RAM means your data won't vanish when your battery does get run down. In the long term, though, we suspect that battery rundowns may become more of a problem, as the battery isn't user-replaceable.

The LifeDrive's nearest competitors are the Tungsten C and the Dell Axim X50v. The Tungsten C is better for e-mail and document editing, thanks to its built-in keyboard, and the Axim's VGA screen and better video-playing software make it better for movies. On the other hand, both devices would become much more expensive than the LifeDrive if you pumped them up with equivalent storage.

For those PC geeks out there who might be wondering, the PDA's hard drive rotates at 3600 rpm, with a 12-ms average seek time and a claimed sustained data transfer rate of 4.3 to 7.2 MBps. Compared with a 1GB 32X Lexar Secure Digital card, it offers a somewhat faster estimated write speed but sucks down about nine times the power and isn't nearly as good at handling shock and temperature extremes. The advantage here is price: 4GB Microdrives currently sell for as little as $169, according to dealram.com, while 4GB CompactFlash modules cost $279 and up and 2GB Secure Digital cards, the largest, start at $193.

The LifeDrive does a lot, and it does it all pretty well. We were disappointed with the crashes we experienced during testing, but the folks at palmOne stated that they were working on fixes. So if you've felt constrained by the storage capacity of other handhelds, and if you can handle its short battery life, you might very well have found your portable digital attic in the LifeDrive.

Benchmarks:

Battery Life:

Continuous video, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on: 2 hours, 32 minutes

Continuous video, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off: 2 hours, 54 minutes

Normal use, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on: 2 hours, 38 minutes

Normal use, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off: 4 hours, 6 minutes