I first got the Life Drive to play with, 3 weeks ago when PalmOne invited me down to London to spend some time with them and I was invited to express my thoughts on their new Life Drive and to tell them what I thought about it. To say that I was excited about this new product is an understatement because it really is a great creation. I have been lucky enough to play and test the Life Drive for some time and I have to say that before I start looking at my review I would consider this a true replacement for my Tungsten C and as avid readers of Palm Addict will know this is something this device has to be good, it has to be on par with my standards for it to even be considered as a possible replacement for my Tungsten C.
So lets talk about the device itself when I first saw the Life Drive a couple of weeks ago I thought to myself wow it’s much smaller than what I originally anticipated and it really is but the thing that made it stand out was first of all the size, it was much lighter than what I anticipated and the overall quality of the device it has a nice polished finished casing which really does give it a good standard. The buttons are great it has four icon buttons on the face of the device, obviously you can predefine what the buttons are for and it has a fantastic five way navigation button in the centre of the button console. At the top of the device it simply says Life Drive at the bottom of the device it says PalmOne and these are engraved onto the front casing. The screen is absolutely fantastic it’s the most clearest Palm device that I have used and when you compare the size of the screen of the Tungsten C compare it to the Life Drive then you really are truly amazed at the quality. The hard drive is fantastic it’s a 4GB hard drive but obviously you don’t actually get to use the 4GB in fact in fact it is something like 3.85GB and this is the storage capacity that is available to you the user. But for a second lets think of what we can do with the hard drive I for example can put lots of I-tunes its not going to fully replace my iPod but it is going to come pretty damn close when I cant be bothered to take my iPod with me, take my Tungsten C with me then all I had to do was take the Life Drive with me and this is fantastic and the great thing is that it is Pocket Tunes and this is brilliant because I absolutely love Pocket Tunes but at the same time I can listen to internet streaming radio using a better quality audio speaker system than that of my Tungsten C and even better I can just put in my headphones into the Life Drive and then I am able to listen to my favourite tunes and believe me there is so much storage space is left even when I have got hundred or so tunes in the Life Drive is absolutely fantastic so I am able to fully use the Life Drive as a temporary iPod, listen to internet streaming radio and continue working and the one great thing about the Life Drive is that its snappy and fast. As I said earlier when I first saw the Life Drive a couple of weeks ago I was amazed at just how fast it really is and it has got a great processor and there was a fantastic processor that was in my Tungsten C and this is pretty much matched with the Life Drive, there is no slowness it is fantastic. But back to the hard drive its going to store your files, its going to store your music, its going to store your photographs and obviously lots of songs and it is a proper multi-media device so that means you can store videos and create images everything from family photographs through to pictures that you may need to take at an event that you are attending it is a fantastic you can really make great use of the 3.85GB hard drive.
The one standard feature that of course that I wanted in this device was Wi-Fi and I wanted Wi-Fi and I certainly got it but I didn’t just get Wi-Fi I also got Bluetooth. It is fantastic I always wanted Bluetooth to go with my Wi-Fi on my Tungsten C, well now I have it with my Life Drive. Now I am not going to dictate to you what you can do using the Wi-Fi hotspots across the world but you can take this device, you can access your email, you can browse the internet, you can listen to internet streaming radio, you can pair it up with a Bluetooth printer or a Bluetooth cell phone and connect to the internet when Wi-Fi hotspots are available. Just think of the many uses that you can take advantage of with this device it is absolutely fantastic because it offers Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Obviously you can access all the standard IMAP, POP email settings plus exchange email accounts as well. Lets talk about some of the specs of the device let me start with the screen now we have got a fantastic screen here we have a high resolution screen that’s 4.80 x 3.20 now it’s a transflective TFT colour display now this baby actually accommodates both landscape and portrait modes now let me just tell you how this works on the left hand side of the device you have a little button and it is fantastic because you just flick it and it can go from portrait to landscape and vice versa its fantastic it really is and its great if I am looking at an internet page and I want to have a look at the full width of the page I just flick it and then I can immediately get landscape mode it is so, so simple it just does it in front of your eyes its very, very quick it is fantastic. Can I just for a second just talk about the weight and the size of this device because I just touched on briefly before and I was telling you that in my view I was amazed at how small this device and also how light it is too, let me give you some facts on it, it is a 193 grams that’s all it weighs and the actually specification measurements are 121 x 7.3 x 1.9 cm how compact is that but the screen is fantastic if I compare the screen on this to the screen on my Tungsten C it is so much more colourful, brighter and obviously I cant get used to the larger screen size it is absolutely fantastic it means that I can get a full document that I am working on see the whole of the detail on the screen, look at the web pages that I am browsing it really is absolutely amazing and fantastic. When I have finished this review you will see my overall conclusion of the Life Drive but believe me this device I am so excited because I cant wait to see what sort of impact it is going to have on the community, I think it is going to be a sure winner, well it is in my eyes anyway. Memory capacity now we have said that it is a 4GB none volatile hard drive memory and 3.85 GB is actually the storage capacity now the best thing with this device is if you let the battery run down and down how many times does with a slightly older Palm device have you used the battery level and it has gone right the way down and then you leave it and then you charge it back up and wham you have lost everything. I have done that one several occasions with my Tungsten C and believe me it is so, so frustrating well you are not going to have this problem anymore because obviously everything is stored on the memory so that’s the good thing about this you are not going to loose any data but still back up your data that’s my best advice to you. Right now in regards to the navigation on this device we know it has got a five way navigator and it has that’s at the centre of the button pad, it has a dynamic input area now we all know what that means it’s the area that you can basically write on, it has Graffiti 2 rather than Graffiti 1, it also has a virtual keyboard and I find that I am actually using the virtual keyboard more than I am with graffiti 2 writing especially on this the screen is fantastic and you can write anywhere on the screen as well so there are a number of input methods available that really make the Life Drive work. Absolutely fantastic we all know what wireless capabilities there are on this first of all we have the basic infrared there are still lots of devices out there that are infrared compatible such as y cell phone for a start we have Wi-Fi now everybody knows how much I use Wi-Fi especially with the Tungsten C and this device is no exception it means I can go to Starbucks, I can use my network at home, I can use my network in the office and for me Wi-Fi is fantastic because I am probably 80% of the time somewhere that has Wi-Fi and I will have something like Verichat. And Verichat for me is like an instant message program where I am always in constant contact with people and they can get in contact with me by sending me a message, to me it is like a bleeper or a pager I can always be contacted and the Life Drive takes advantage of this by having built in Wi-Fi. It has built in Bluetooth too, which is something that I always wanted for the Tungsten C, Bluetooth is something that I know a lot of Tungsten C users wanted and we certainly now have this with the Life Drive. OK we have audio capabilities, we are able to take voice vocal notes so we can use the microphone to relate any notes that we may want to leave ourselves and I can do this very easily and Lindsey can pick up anything that I have dictated into the device. Lets take a look at the expansion capabilities if and I am sure that some people will want more memory but 4 GB may not be enough for you then don’t despair because it obviously has multi-media card expansion so you can top up your memory should there be a need to and the expansion slot is in the top left hand side of the Life Drive which is fantastic.
Let me tell you one of the neatest little features to this device, how many times have you put your Palm device in your Pocket and accidentally you have switched it on by touching the screen has this ever happened to you? It has happened to me a thousand times especially with the Tungsten C well the Life Drive is going to put all of that on hold because what we have in the Life Drive is an on/off hold switch where if you want it to stay on it will stay on, if you want it permanently switched off it will switch itself off you have to manually switch it on and off yourself this is great because it is going to stop accidental switch on and at the same time it is going to conserve your battery power which can I also add that the battery power in this little baby is absolutely fantastic but if you want your battery to last longer then obviously you don’t want any accidental switch on the guys have recognised this and they have done something about it and they have implemented that within the Life Drive. I told you it is a fantastic device I am really loving it already.
Going back to the device itself let me tell you about some of the software that is with it right, organisation wise we have the standards we have the calendar, the contacts, notepad, memos for writing those quick notes obviously you have tasks built in, voice memo as I mentioned great for taking very quick voice notes. We have favourites and files we have a fantastic world clock, the calculator as always is very handy we have an expense program built in too and off course we have security we have a password protection key lock for the device which also includes 128 bit data encryptions. Now we have documents to go with this it is the professional additions 7.0 which is going to allow you to edit and create your Word, Excel and Power point presentation and files. Now we have Blazer web the browser which is up to 4.0 which is great because I have actually always wanted to use that and that’s obviously built right in to Life Drive and it works like a dream it is fantastic I also think it is a lot faster as well, we have Versamail 3.1 that’s also built in as well but if you don’t like Versamail then go with Snappermail obviously the Snappermail is not included in their. We have WiFile which is absolutely fantastic WiFiles is in with the Life Drive a great software. Now lets talk about multi-media which is something that I have been really excited about and which is absolutely fantastic, Pocket Tunes is brilliant it really, really is and it’s the new audio player in this thing. But it really does, it plays music and tunes absolutely fantastic yet we have a e-book reader in there we have Pocket Tunes which is the MP3 audio player again it is absolutely fantastic. There’s a Pocket Tunes desktop plug in this only really works with Windows Media Player and is only for Windows only but I have not really tried or tested this so I will leave this down to you to come back to me with opinions. Now there is a game built-in and it is hand marked solitaire and that’s built into the Palm device this time round and just talk about desktop connectivity for a second we have Palms desktop 4.1 which is obviously compatible with the PC and the Mac and there is also Microsoft Outlook conduit built in there too.
Now I want to start tying up my thoughts and opinions on the Life Drive but let me just say one thing it has taken a while for me to be able to find a PDA that would ever be considered as a replacement for my Tungsten C. the closest I got was the TH-55 which was a Sony Clie device and I used for some time and I thoroughly enjoyed using it but the processor was a little bit slow and I am a power user and I wanted something that really had a fast processor and in the end in fact I gave my TH-55 over to Jan our deputy editor here at Palm Addict. When I first set eyes on the Life Drive almost a month ago I was amazed, I had seen the rumours on many websites, I had seen pictures and images some were false, some were close to the truth but when you see this device for real it really has a wow factor it is smaller than I imagined but it fits nicely into my Palm and it also comes with a case anyway of course it comes with a basic case anyway. This device fits nicely into my Palm and its lovely to use, it has a great stylus I think it is actually the same stylus that you will find in the Tungsten T3 it has a stylus that feels good in the hand too, and the keyboard and the writing input on the device is fantastic whether or not it is going to have the same problems as the Tungsten T3 and the Tungsten T5 is yet to be seen and I am sure that we are going to be seeing lots of comments on this on the forum and on other websites too but for me personally the Life Drive has really got me excited about the PDA community I have yet to get bored of it, it works fantastic it is fast, it allows me to work and listen to my MP3’s which I know that this has been something that you have been able to do with recent Palm devices but I have never been able to do this with my Tungsten C. it takes great advantage of multi-media especially with Pocket Tunes it is great to see Pocket Tunes built into this device and the screen itself I have seriously yet to get used to having a large screen on my Palm device but the Life Drive really makes it come alive it is fantastic the screen is brilliant I am really loving it and at the moment I don’t think I am going to get bored of it.
So let me tie up loose ends here and tell you what I think of the Life Drive if I had to give the Life Drive a score out of ten then I would seriously be considering giving this a 15 out of 10 and I know that sounds completely over the top but I absolutely love the Life Drive it really is getting high marks from me, I know that there is a lot more technically minded Palm users than I am who will spot problems I am sure but for I would call myself a power user to the point that my Palm really comes with me all the time and it works with me but I am happy with the device it is working for me and for that alone and it is exciting to use and for that alone it gets such a high mark. Who do I recommend should of created this Palm device? If you want memory storage then this is the Palm device to go for many of people are going to say well I can just get an SD card to go with it and that is fine you are entitled to your opinion on that but for me I am going to say if you want Wi-Fi, if you want Bluetooth, if you want a high storage capacity and you want that in the one device Life Drive is your man. I am so glad that PalmOne introduced me to the Life Drive almost a month ago and I have already expressed my views to Palm executives about the Life Drive I think it is absolutely a fantastic device which I think and hope will score PalmOne great marks and will see them at the leading edge of the PDA industry. I would of liked to have seen a built in camera to this but obviously I can use my Veo camera and not worry about running out of storage space because the 3.85GB easily accommodates my photographs. So final words on the Life Drive, I absolutely love it the question I know I will receive from readers is, is it an ideal replacement for my Tungsten TC? I will simply say my Tungsten TC may see itself for up for sale in the near future.
- Sammy (Manchester, UK)
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