Brighthand's Ed Hardy is running the story this morning that despite all recent rumors, palmOne is
not planning to release a palmOne Zire 73 device. But fear not, according to Ed, palmOne has something much better up its sleeve:
palmOne's next consumer-oriented handheld is going to be the LifeDrive, a model that bears almost no resemblance to its predecessors. This device will get really serious about multimedia. It will include a large screen, a 4 GB microdrive, and multiple kinds of wireless networking. The Zire 72 can play audio and video that has been converted on a PC and them moved onto the device. Please forgive me for using a cliche, but that's so 1990s. The LifeDrive will be able to play audio and video streamed directly from a web site, without users having to go to the hassle of converting it to a new format.
You can read more about his LifeDrive praise
here. With all the joy let's not forget that Pocket PCs have been able to play native audio and video files for quite some time - even streamed from the Web or a shared network drive.