palmOne LifeDrive review

PalmOne's LifeDrive is aimed at the top end of the PDA market, and its design reflects this. It looks very expensive, with a brushed metal front and back and large solid metal short cut buttons under the screen.

The LifeDrive is part of palmOne's Mobile Manager range, and is the first PDA to use a Hitachi Microdrive for storage rather than flash memory; it has 4GB of storage. This is a media player as well as a device for storing contact and calendar information. Getting media content on to the player is very easy using the LifeDrive Manager software. Once you have synchronised the PDA with your PC using the supplied USB cable, your video, image or audio files can be dropped into the relevant folders on the LifeDrive. The software gives you the option to leave the files as they are for storage or convert them for playback on the PDA.

The LifeDrive doesn't come with headphones, but if you plug in your own it works well as an MP3 player. Video is disappointing, though. The conversion process is slow and playback on the PDA is jerky and too dark, even with the screen at full brightness. Images are bright and clear on the screen, but we found the conversion process stripped much of the detail from digital photos. Photos left in their original resolution look far better. One of the most useful features is the Camera Companion function. This lets you transfer images from your digital camera's SD card to the LifeDrive, and would be ideal on a long holiday where you want to take hundreds of photos.

The downside to the LifeDrive's capacity is its relatively slow speed. The LifeDrive is still a fully featured PDA that synchronises with Outlook and has built-in Bluetooth and wireless networking, but its software runs slowly. Loading applications takes longer than on such devices as the Treo 650 because the hard disk is slower to access than flash memory. There is a delay of a couple of seconds when loading new applications, which can be frustrating if you are used to the instant loading times of a normal Palm OS device. Fortunately, frequently used programs are cached in the internal 64MB of memory, helping them to load faster.

No handheld can do as much as palmOne's LifeDrive, and £300 for a PDA and hard disk media player is great value. It doesn't run as quickly as most Palm OS devices and its video playback is disappointing, but the software and quality audio make this the best multimedia PDA available.