WSJ editor Walter Mossberg
reviewed the PalmOne LifeDrive and he concluded that although the device makes a nice storage warehouse, its poor battery performance was a disappointing one:
Quote:
The palmOne LifeDrive is a pretty fair little gadget for offloading important digital data that you want to keep with you while traveling or on a day-to-day basis. It would be especially handy for digital camera users who want a good way to offload photos when they can't get back to their computers to do so.
But it's expensive, it's bulky, and its poor battery life is really limiting, especially for people who will want to access their media and use the LifeDrive for Internet access over the course of a whole day. Until the company can improve battery life of the LifeDrive, we can't wholeheartedly recommend it.
Even if palmOne fixes the battery issue, it's not clear that the inclusion of the hard disk can revive the fading PDA category. Smart phones are also getting hard disks -- the first prototypes of hard-disk phones have already been shown in Korea and Finland. And once such hard-disk phones become common, they should be able to do everything the LifeDrive does and more, albeit with a smaller screen. So why carry a second, bulky device?
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