Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager
by Palm
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager
Customer Review: An honest look at it all...
Summary: 5 Stars
Let me preface this review by saying that I did in fact order mine - it should be arriving any day and I look forward to posting a very honest review of this palm handheld.
I just had to post this review to combat those many bad reviews on this item. It technically is not available yet and will not be released until the 30th of May. To all those WinCE users out there - stop complaining about items you don't even use!
Now I have a long history of having palm handhelds - from my first Palm V to my current Palm Tungsten T3, I have a good viewpoint on their company's evolution (albeit slow). I recently left Palm for Sony's CLIE TH-55 which I thought was the best all-around PDA available at the time. It had everything I could ever want, and more! I decided to stick with Palm since Sony was leaving the market and purchased a Tungsten E which I was sorely dissapointed by. Long gone was the metal for PDAs from this company, as seen by their recent trend with the Tungsten T5 (plastic, plastic), and their new E2 (plastic again).
I sold my Tungsten E and purchased a T3 the moment the T5 was available because that perhaps was one of the larger dissapointments in Palm's history. Well, here were are with them satisfying our needs with 4 GB of storage space, Wi-fi, bluetooth, and USB 2.0 (yes, it has USB 2.0 unlike other's reviews).
So why did I order this item? I plan to have it replace my USB flash drives, I look forward to checking my email wherever I am at work or in my house with the wireless networks. Heck - even when I'm waiting for food at Starbucks or Panera I can leech onto their free Wi-fi. Battery life? I'm hoping its better than what I get with my current T3 - though nothing beats that Sony CLIE I had thus far in the battery life comparison. I'll post an addendum to this review once I've used my new LifeDrive for a month or so. Keep an eye open for my updates!
Customer Review: Nice first take
Summary: 5 Stars
I've had the LifeDrive for a few weeks now and I absoulutely love it. The complaints about load delays are way overblown. It's not as snappy as the t5 but we are talking seconds here to swap between apps and as they get cached, there is no delay.
Pros
Beautiful screen. Not quite as bright as the 650 but much
brighter than the t3. The color is better too.
Built in Wifi is easy to configure and along with the browser is very fast.
PocketTunes works really well as an mp3 player. Much better than the Real one from the t3
Versamail is a good email app. I do wish it would load office docs into docs to go though instead of using its viewer.
Drive mode makes it easy to walk up to any pc and transfer files at USB2 speeds.
Hardware button to toggle between landscape and portrait modes.
Battery life seems good. It's not as good as a dedicated media player but this unit does a heck of a lot more.
I like the power slider where you can lock the unit to "Off". i cant tell you how many times i've taken my t3 out of the bag and it was on.
Cons
The mp3 player skips in the background when loading off the hard drive. I hope that PalmOne can fix this with a patch.
The video player should play a wider variety of formats and palm should provide software to convert a DVD to mpeg at the lifedrive screen size.
I wish pocketTunes would play unproteted AAC files. It's a nice codec and much leaner than mp3.
for ~500 they shoulkd have just put 64mb of NVRAM in the unit instead of reserving a portion of the hd for storage. Would have made the battery last a lot longer.
There are a few minor warts but overall i'd say it's a terrific first attempt. Five stars for breaking new ground with a convergent device and getting it mostly right.
Customer Review: Great Device with Tons of Storage
Summary: 5 Stars
I have had this item for about 2 weeks now, and I love it! I can place hours of music, a couple of movies, and still have over a gig of storage for my doc files! (I currently have 700 MB of music, a 700 MB movie, two 175 MB TV shows (converted from DVD), over 400 pictures from my honeymoon and 1 yr anniversary vacation, and a couple of documents with 1.7 gigs free! Some of the issues noted (squealing while listening to MP3s and stability) have been updated by Palm as of Dec 1. You will likely have to do the update when you get it, but it's worth it!
One thing to note, be very careful when installing 3rd party apps. I have had 2 apps crash my system causing me to do a hard reset (erase). As well, sometimes those apps will corrupt your sync login. If you create a new sync account, and copy your contacts, etc. over to it on your PC, you can sync back up just fine. So be careful, not every piece of available software will work on this machine. Of course the software titles I am referring to are freeware apps found on the net.
Other than the 3rd party software issue, this machine has been stable for me, I even dropped it from about 3.5 ft while the HD was spinning! It still works. The lag doesn't bother me so much, but that's probably because I didn't come from using another PDA, and it's really not that bad. I tested another Palm product in the store just to see, and it didn't seem that much faster to me. I don't know how long a PDA's battery should last, but mine lasts me all day listening to MP3s and 2 days if I just use it. Palm reccommends 30 minutes of charge everyday anyway, so I usually use it enough to run it down and let it charge overnight, although I haven't done that everytime.
I highly reccomend this device, but be sure to download the update before doing anything else with it... it will make your life easier.
Customer Review: New Era
Summary: 5 Stars
The LifeDrive is the beginning of a new era in PDAs. It is the first pda to have an integrated hard drive. Thanks to this fact, pdas can now become true mobile media units. If you are only going to listen to MP3 formated songs, there is no need to get an MP3 player in addition to this unit. The integration of the PDA and the MP3 player is now beginning.
If you care about why this is took so long, read the following paragraph. Otherwise, skip it.
Many are wondering why it took this so long to happen when the ipod has been out for years. Well, almost the entire ipod is made up of the hard drive. On PDAs, this space is needed for the processor, RAM, the screen, ect. Recently, Toshiba and other companies have introduced a .85 in. 4 GB microdrive that has been small enough to fit in PDAs. This has allowed the creation of the microdrive and will undoubtable filter down into other PDAs from both Microsoft and PalmOne.
In addition to the hard drive, PalmOne has included bluetooth, wi-fi, a 320x480 hi-resolution screen, and a 416MHz XScale processor. Bassicly, this PDA has just about everything you could want or need. Some may want am integrated keyboard or have other design complaints, but this is a mater of personal preference.
Now the only place left to go is to integrate a hard drive into a new design of the palmone treo. We should probably expect to see this sometime in the 4 quarter of this year. This would spell the integration of PDA, MP3 player, and phone, which is ultimatly where we are heading.
If you don't need an integrated phone, then this is a wonderful choice. I however will wait on the hard drive to be brought to the PDA phones out there.
Customer Review: Excellent PDA with some (minor) flaws.
Summary: 5 Stars
Having been using this for about 2 weeks, i began to see what a great mobile manager this is. Its great becuase i can put all my contacts in here, knowing therye all safely stored. Movie and sound quality is great but i REALLY reccomend getting a headphone. Having the Dialer is great becuase i can phone anyone on my contact listt and yes it does cost becuase your using it through your original phone. Playing games is excellent - I have all the emulators Snes,Gameboy,Gameboy Advance,Sega Genesis - All work fine again though you need a programe called UMDH.
The LifeDrive is very easy to use, first time i was able to know how to do everything - but i suggest reading the manual (I don't)becuase there are some neat tricks to learn.
The LifeDrive programe is great! unlike other PDA's - instead of hotsync - now you can drag all your favourite files without a sweat!
I was dissapointed with the WiFi (Wireless Internet) use at first but i found out there was an update that fixes the problem now it works great and looks great too, but don't except to use it too much as its a battery eater.
Speaking of battery, without using Bluetooth or WiFi it runs about 6 hours, With Bluetooth and WiFi its about erh 2 hours (Yes its that much of a killer).
Yes its true there is like a 2 second freeze when you open a programe but its not THAT bad - Can't you guys wait. I cant see why people have reviewed it badly - i really don't, i wonder if they actually owned the device...
Overall i would suggest this device to those that are constantly on the go - Either at Work or College, this device will be the other Foot of your body. It will carry you throughout the day.