Loading ...Pa1mOne’s LifeDrive Announced
Today the long-awaited LifeDrive from Pa1mOne was announced. TreoCentral has a great synopsis and links to various articles about it on the web.
I applaud Pa1mOne for being the first PDA to actually use a hard drive expanding their line to include a hard-drive-based device. What took these companies so long? Apple has had the hard drive iPod out for what, 5 years almost? They’ve even had their Mini iPod with a very small 4gb (now up to 6gb) hard drive. Frankly this is overdue. It’s also a bit ironic considering the debacle that Pa1mOne caused by not only keeping the same low amount of memory from their Treo 600 to their Treo 650 phone, but adding insult to injury by actually making the memory significantly less efficient thereby effectively decreasing the amount of it – something that they are still trying to fix.
Nevertheless, as I said, hands off to you, Pa1mOne, now let’s see this same hard drive technology expanded to other devices, in particular, your next smartphone, the Treo 700, or whatever it may be called… “CallDrive”? Obviously there are many advantages that flash memory has over a hard drive including speed, resistance to breaking, etc. But the one big advantage that hard drives still have over flash is cost.
The other key features that the LifeDrive has which will really make it the premier PDA until the competition can catch up are the screen and built-in Wifi. Some PocketPC’s have enjoyed built-in Wifi capability for a while, but this is the first PalmOS device one of only two Pa1mOne devices to have this feature built in. Most PalmOS devices (Treos included) don’t even have an option for external Wifi solutions, although Enfora will be offering options for Treo 600’s and 650’s any day now. As PDA’s and smartphones become beefier and more realistic alternatives for carrying around a laptop, a large, high-resolution screen is a must for legibility. Who wants to read a document or a web page that will only show you 30 characters per line, or only one third of a picture until you scroll (or shrink it down so much to fit inside the screen that you can’t tell what it is)?
The only disappointment for me is that the LifeDrive doesn’t come with a keyboard. But I realize this is a personal taste and that many can get along fine with handwriting recognition, and there are always external small keyboards for those who need them. It also doesn’t have a built-in camera, which would have been nice. Finally, LifeDrive runs on the same OS that my Treo does – PalmOS 5.4 or Garnet. While I certainly don’t mind this, it would have been that much more irresistible if Pa1mOne had actually been able to wait until Cobalt, their next generation OS, is out. Cobalt will make the big jump into a truly multithreaded OS which will improve the usability of PalmOS devices by an order of magnitude.
