The Life Drive

Recently I took jumped back into a situation that I thought I was able to leave behind. I got a PDA. I tried PDA’s both Palm and Windows based, but didn’t really take to them. I had the classic issues. Too little memory, battery life problems, not completely sold on the screen color and in the case of the palm lack the lack there of. On top of that connecting to email and other apps felt weak and plainly sucked from my point of view.

About three months ago I made a new career move. In this new position I’m really one the move and lugging around my lap-top everywhere was somewhat lame. It was inconvenient on a lot of different levels. After thinking about it, a possible solution came to mind. Get a PDA. I looked did my due diligence and checked out a lot of different PDA’s, both Palm and one that support Pocket PC and Windows Mobile. After some testing I decided to get a Palm Life Drive.

The reason why I was willing to go with the Life Drive stated with the memory space. 4 GB. That was pretty cool. The other things that appealed to me was the built-in wireless 802.11 which come in very handy as I move though the building and connect to the network from any location. My email, contacts, calendars, word documents, excel spread sheets and anything else I was to access are right there, literally at my finger tips. Nice.

Despite all that the Palm Life Drive offers, the crucial test is all about the battery life. When I read the instructions, Palm recommends charging the device every night. That instruction should initially set off some alarm bells. Then again it makes sense since the Palm Life Drive can serve as a additional “hard-drive,” MP3 player (which I haven’t tried as yet), and hold and view pictures. Despite the instructions I have found the battery life to be great. This is probably because I don’t use the MP3 player or other things mentioned above. Isn’t that what Apple iPods are for?

Overall I found that I really enjoy my Palm Life Drive. It really fits the bill nicely. I have found one odd peculiarity that you might want to be aware of. Every once in a while I click on an application and the device reboots itself. I haven’t lost data, but find it somewhat odd and annoying. I would suspect that there will be a firmware update to correct this problem and it only happens rarely.

Conclusion:
You might find the Palm Life Drive on the expensive side. Mine was 399.00. But then again that is the same price of most Pocket PC and Windows Mobile devices yet you don’t get nearly the same amount of space. Another thing to note is though I didn’t really need to, I got the professional version of Documents To Go, which added software exactly like my Microsoft Outlook (read, there’s no place like home). I would rate my experience with my Palm Life drive as very good and am definitely happy with it and get a twinge of anxiety when I don’t have it with me (which is a good sign from a geek perspective).

If you have a Palm Life Drive let me know what you think. I’d be interested to hear your views.

// Jaye Morris, Technologist