Mossberg reviews the PalmOne LifeDrive

[Colin Dunstan]

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:

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?

[Brian]

Here's a link to Walt's review at his Ptech WSJ site (no reg required).


Brian

[radleyp]

There's a discussion (which I started) going on about this over at the woyp site. Mossberg and his assistant really used the LD for awhile, which makes me trust his conclusions. The battery problem is a bit of a shocker to me, as I assumed that much of the increased size of the LD was due to the inclusion of a much larger battery. If the LD is intended - as Palm has implied and others have stated - as an "everything" device, the poor battery life is a killer. Granted, battery technology has been slow to make progress, still Palm should know how to manage resources better. Let's hope the LD successor is a big improvement in the battery department. Philippe Radley

[Traecer Prime]

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?

And that's why: The Screen. As far as PIMs go, my SE T610 can do almost everything my Palm can, but the small screen (combined with the horrible menu system required to handle such a small screen) means I don't use it.

[Colin Dunstan]

Originally Posted by Traecer Prime

And that's why: The Screen. As far as PIMs go, my SE T610 can do almost everything my Palm can, but the small screen (combined with the horrible menu system required to handle such a small screen) means I don't use it.

Good point. I think this is something many convergence advocates ignore. True, if the LifeDrive was just a "warehouse" for multimedia files, then the big screen wouldn't be necessary. But I seriously doubt that either PalmOne or its customers intented to use the LifeDrive for merely this purpose.