Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager
by Palm
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager
Customer Review: Good for some things, but needs work!
Summary: 3 Stars
I've owned my LifeDrive for a week now, and this is my experience.
I reinstalled everything from scratch, as I'd heard about software incompatibitity problems causing crashes and have been fairly careful to have the latest versions of things, though I suppose there's a few Exceptions!
Pros.
1. Heaps of Storage - really good for playing avi movies or mp3s on the 1 hour train trip to work. I can carry quite a few movies and several hours of music, and still have plenty of room for other stuff. I even use it as a small protable HDD for taking things to and from work.
2. The screen is great.
3. Love the Wi-Fi, though I wonder how much better 802.11g would be.
4. Video Playback flawless from the HDD, using TCPMP.
5. Good quality audio playback (provided you don't use it for anything else whilst playing music!)
Cons.
1. Regular crashes - I expect 3 or 4 a day, with about 4 minutes to reboot after each. Crashes normally happen when launching or exiting software and I get at least one a day at the end of a hotsync - I've never had one whilst playing a video or listening to music (provided I'm not switching applications)
2. If you try listening to music whilst doing anything else, particularly launching apps or having alarms pop up, you get severe stuttering. I even tried moving the music off to my SD card, but that hasn't helped much.
3. If the HDD has powered down, it can take up to 15 (average about 3-5 seconds) seconds to launch apps - I'm used to almost instant with my old T3.
Overall, I think it's more positive than negative, however I think it could have done with 64 MB NVRAM for running the OS and apps, something like the T5 setup, maybe. I think at the moment, it's like your computer, loads everything into Volatile RAM from the HDD. Then they could have just used the HDD as a big SD card.
I hope they're going to release an update to deal with the crashes!
Given my time again, I think I might have gone for a TX with a 2GB SD card or two!
Customer Review: Could be a great handheld
Summary: 2 Stars
I really like LifeDrive - nice design, great screen, wi-fi and bluetooth, hard drive that could be mounted to your PC as a USB drive... Synchronization was much faster than in my earlier Palm. I really wish I could keep it as my new Palm - but it has terrible reliability.
The device keeps resetting it all the time (and it took a whole lot each time). I have added just five of my most important programs - both developed for OS5 and large screens. In addition to it I used Web browser. Typicaly, after about 10 min of work I have a reset. Worst, twice the reset was cyclic - the unit was not going out of reset loop - if you leave it, it goes through this reset nonstop. So, I had to do full hard reset to stop it - and re-install all my files. If you think it is easy - consider entering several 16 digit keys to personalize software... After second hard reset I feel it is simply wasting of time to put any of my stuff there again. Note that I have installed the recommended the ROM upgrade...
Interesting enough, each time the reset happened when I was using some of Palm own programs - not one of those I have installed. Most frequently Web browser, often preferences screen or wireless settings. Other Palm programs were reasonably OK.
I was thinking that I am just unlucky with a flawed device - but after reading the comments I realized that the chance to get a good one on the second attempt is low - besides everyone tells that Palm sends refurbished devices. So, switched to TX that is not as cool, misses several features - like drive mode, but seems to be very stable.
Palm, please, can't you make this LifeDrive reliable? And, if possible, add the phone in. I used to have Visor Prism with a VisorPhone and miss it very much. Treo is not a good replacement - screen is too small, no wi-fi, and no grafiti area. Well, some like buttons, but grafiti is faster. A combnation of LifeDrive with Treo 650 would be an ultimate handheld.
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: Wrong product.. wrong time.
Summary: 1 Stars
Wrong product.. wrong time.
Consumers of US have been offered new electronics products almost everyday. But how many times we look at them and say, "I want that!" PalmOne's LifeDrive is not going to make you say that, either.
Major features of the product:
* Palm OS 5.4
* Intel Processor
* 4G HD
* Wi-Fi 802.11b
* Bluetooth 1.1
* USB 2.0
* Big color display
* Support for Microsoft Documents
* Voice Recorder
* Camera Companion Software
* MP3 Player
This is not impressive.If PalmOne wants to be ahead of the curve, they should have added Wi-Fi 802.11g. Bluetooth and USB 2.0 are pretty much necessary and they are good there.
Lets do a quick comparison of this product,
PalmOne Treo 650: $400 (And lot cheaper with cell phone service annual contract)
Features: Cell, PDA, Camera, MP3 Player, SpeakerPhone, Bluetooth, 23MB
Nokia 6620: $350 (less than $100 with annual plan)
Features: Cell, PDA, Camera, MP3 Player, Speakerphone, Bluetooth 12MB
Why am I comparing with cell phones? Because we have to have one and what is missing in them is the big hard-drive. For that, I am not going to buy LifeDrive. I will rather just a get a USB drive/firewire drive for 50 bucks which I don't need to upgrade or something, or better yet, an iPod which is an excellent USB Hard-Drive (iPod Photo fo 30G $349)
If PalmOne is thinking that this device is going to fill the gap between your office computer, home computer, camera, I think they are wrong. We need little more integration like combination of a Nokia Cell, PDA, Apple MP3 player, small Sony camera, Big Hitachi Hard drive. And all of this still should be bigger than the Palm Treo.
Bottom Line: I wouldn't waste my money on this. I am sure something more worthwhile will come before end of this year.
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.