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Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager Review
A New Breed of PDA
Gerry Blackwell

If you need to take your documents and files on the road or quickly and easily transfer them to other PCs, then a new type of PDA from Palm could be just what you need. In fact, if you travel with a notebook more for its storage than its processing abilities, you might be able to replace it with the LifeDrive Mobile Manager ($499).

At 4.8 by 2.9 by 0.75 inches, the 6.8-ounce LifeDrive is certainly easier to carry than a laptop, fitting readily into a jacket pocket or purse. And with a 4GB hard disk, Intel XScale CPU, and both Bluetooth and 802.11b WiFi wireless connectivity, it also does most of the light computing tasks for which you probably use your laptop when on the road. The LifeDrive lets you store and organize contacts, track expenses, send and receive e-mails and instant messages, browse the Web (over a WiFi connection), make handwritten or spoken notes, and keep yourself entertained with videos and music.

If you add a keyboard, whether Palm's $70 wireless model or a third party's, you can even type large volumes of text using the supplied DataViz Documents To Go handheld-viewing and -editing counterparts to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You also get Palm-sized versions of the VersaMail 3.1 e-mail client, Blazer 4.1 Web browser, and Adobe Acrobat PDF reader, in addition to the usual Palm calendar, contacts, to-do list, and voice-memo-recording modules. Most of the many other Palm applications you can download from sites like Palm Boulevard and Handango also work on the LifeDrive.

The device's $499 price tag may seem a bit high when you consider that music players with 4GB hard drives cost far less. Then again, the LifeDrive does a lot more than play MP3 tunes. Its only big drawback as a PDA is that it can't also replace your wireless phone the way smart phones such as Palm's Treo 650 can.

Some people will reject LifeDrive because it has no telephony functions. But while we admire combo PDA/phones, we're not sure it's essential to have one device that does everything. Carrying a LifeDrive plus a slim cell phone takes up little more pocket space than a Treo or Windows Mobile phone, and arguably offers more flexibility. If your phone has Bluetooth capability, you can even dial numbers on it from the LifeDrive contacts list.

Reference: http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reviews/5953/1/

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