Product Reviews

We've often complained about PalmOne's apparent reluctance to produce a PDA that features both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but at last it has done it with the PalmOne LifeDrive. And it's even better than we'd hoped.

So why did we want Bluetooth and Wi-Fi? Simple: you can use your wireless network at home or at the office, but also connect to a compatible mobile phone using Bluetooth when you're out and about. It means you have fast, effectively free bandwidth while you're static, but can still email and browse the web when out of range of your wireless networks or a wireless hotspot.

Using either service is reasonably easy. However, if you've never used a Palm OS PDA before or have only limited computer knowledge, setting up the PalmOne LifeDrive could prove a little challenging.

There's no true location-awareness equivalent to the Mac's network locations. This means you can't, for example, set up a 'mobile' profile that just uses the Bluetooth connection and a work wireless connection that ignores the Bluetooth port and uses your work network proxies. At least it remembers the settings associated with each wireless network to which it connects (such as whether it uses DHCP or manually assigned IP addresses), so once it has latched onto a network, everything should run smoothly. The exceptions are proxies, as these are set from within the web browser, not on a per-network basis. The bottom line is that network connection is relatively easy, but could be streamlined.

Once you're connected, everything's pretty fast. Email is pulled down over Wi-Fi with alacrity, although the browser can't quite render pages fast enough to feel nippy. The LifeDrive uses slightly outdated wireless technology (802.11b and Bluetooth 1.1), but they're fine here, especially given the price.

We're big fans of the bundled email client, Versamail: it performs superbly within the structures of the small screen, and we'd even be happy to recommend it as a main email client for light to moderate emailing. It supports most of the features of a desktop email client, including multiple accounts (even Microsoft Exchange for corporate environments), attachments and rules.

The browser is PalmOne's standard offering, Blazer, with which we're

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less impressed. It can be a little sluggish, and, although it can make a good stab at optimising pages on the 320 x 480 pixel screen, it sometimes fails to display pages well. There's always the option of switching to widescreen mode, where the page is displayed more as it would be on a desktop computer, with the option to scroll around it. There's also a limit on the size of pages that can be handled, although the only page that tripped this in our testing, oddly, was the My eBay page. The screen can be flipped from portrait to landscape with a dedicated hardware button.

The LifeDrive has all the usual PIM stuff - address book, diary, tasks - which can sync either with Apple's own apps (Address Book and iCal) or with Entourage. There's a media viewer that shows a wide range of still and video images, an MP3 player (Pocket Tunes), and Documents to Go 7 so you can create and edit Word and Excel files and view PowerPoint files on the go.

The device has a microphone to record memos, and we love the camera companion software, which allows you to empty your SD/MMC card onto the LifeDrive's hard disk during a long shoot. If your camera uses a different memory card format, you can buy an adaptor.

There's no instant messaging client, nor can you use any VoIP software such as Skype, which is possible on Pocket PC devices. Mac users miss out on the ability to synchronise folders to the LifeDrive from a desktop computer, but at least we can still use Documents to Go to sync text and spreadsheet documents specifically.

All this media is held on the LifeDrive's big surprise: a 4GB Microdrive. PalmOne has finally realised that as well as carrying around appointments and contacts, we want to carry other media, too. Connect it up using the USB cable, and it mounts on your desktop to be treated as any other hard disk.

The decision to plump for Microdrive rather than CompactFlash was probably budgetary, but it does mean the LifeDrive often stutters a little in use due to the hard disk spinning up and down.

Battery life is predictably shorter than Palm users will be used to, thanks to the huge, beautiful screen, hard disk and Wi-Fi: we had to charge the battery every second day.

Audio performance is disappointing. Pocket Tunes is good, but we heard some shocking interference; we hope PalmOne fixes this with a firmware update, as otherwise this would be an excellent music player. Our review model's screen also whined noticeably.

So it's a bit of a mixed bag, but the thing that really swings it is the price. We wouldn't have been surprised to see PalmOne charging the better part of £500 for this device, so a list price of £330 and a street price of £300 already means we can overlook most of its deficiencies. The PalmOne LifeDrive may prove to be the device that saves the PDA market.