It takes something special to drag LP out of bed and onto a hot London tube, but the promise of time to play with PalmOne's new baby 4gb LifeDrive was enough to get him moving. The Life drive is a curious animal, PDA in form and possibly function yet with a 4gb Hitachi hard drive pushing it into mini MP3 player and almost laptop territory. Palmone say that this is a device to carry your digital life in, from our first play it seem to be ideal for synchronising your my documents folder from a PC to the LifeDrive.

First reaction when you slide the silver finished LifeDrive from its box is "man that's big" and indeed it is, while similar in length and width to most PDA's 121mm x 73mm its 19mm depth makes it feel at best chunky and at worst bloated. if you are concerned by size then don't get your Life Drive anywhere near the scales as this little porker weighs 193 grams which is way more than we'd accept for a smartphone or portable MP3 player.

So this "solid" device better have some great features to persuade us to cart it around. Based around a 416Mhz Intel XScale processor and 64mb or RAM its comparable to a number of high end PDA's and the fact it runs Palm's OS 5.4 Garnet makes it very similar to their own Tungsten T5. The 320x480 Transflective TFT screen is similar to that used in the T5 but the colours are far more vivid and life like, the brightness seems to be about the same but the 65k colours really shine though.

Its packed with all the usual Palm goodies including the latest Blazer web browser and Versa email applications ensuring its ready for use with the internet, plus a host of to-do and calendar type applications that you'd expect to find on a Palm PDA.

Ptunes is an extra application which does its best to make the LifeDrive an MP3 player, but it is limited in its ability and fails to make the most of the large touch screen, plus PalmOne have decided to place the 3.5mm audio jack on the bottom of the Lifedrive, hardly the best place.

Then we have Camera Companion. This little application allows you to directly suck images from a digital cameras memory card to view on the large LifeDrive screen, its very simple to use and once you've inserted the SD or MMC card the programme runs automatically. We also had a chance to try out the LifeDrives video playback, sadly we had to rely on the pre loaded files rather than our own encoded and arguably more difficult ones. Video playback was smooth and stutter free although we did notice a fair deal of pixelation from an MPEG-4 clip.

The 5 way control pad is quite different to other PalmOne gadgets, the central button remains but the sliver lip around it acts as the main scrolling control with a further 4 application buttons clustered around that. The aim of all these changes is to reduce the need for stylus operation and make the LifeDrive a true one handed bit of kit, in this respect it does succeed.

Getting files on and off your LifeDrive is well catered for, the 4gb drive can be reached via USB and two wireless methods, first up there is Bluetooth 1.1 which works well with mobile phones and communication devices, even other PDA's. Then PalmOne have also blessed the drive with WiFi 802.11b connectivity meaning it can be part of your home or office network, even use a WiFi hotspot.

The thing that struck us about both of these methods is the strange choice of outgoing technology, most devices are now using WiFi 802.11g for faster connections and the mobile world is already launching product based on Bluetooth 1.2. Now you could argue that the 802.11g wifi standard use a bit more battery than the older standard but this is really a poor excuse.

That said the WiFi worked well and we had a chance to browse the web using the Blazer application, the large screen in landscape mode is ideal for web surfing, Bluetooth is also useful for sending SMS from the life drive and for accessing files stored on your mobile.

Battery life could be the killer for the LifeDrive, for if you've stored your entire digital life on the 4gb drive then you may not be too chuffed at the 6 hour performance when just playing constant MP3's, not exactly up to the 12hour iPod performance. But with liberal use you should get around 2 days of use from the 1660 mAh battery between charges.

While our short time with the LifeDrive shows it to be a stylish and well built device we were left with a nagging doubt. A device that claims to be able to store your digital life yet only has 4gb of storage is somewhat of a disappointment, the battery life isn't really enough to beat an MP3 player and it doesn't have all those extras many PDA's and Smartphones now call standard.

On sale at £329 its not exactly cheap either, it remains to be seen if PalmOnes marketing can create enough interest in what is really a PDA with 4 Gigabytes of memory.

Published - 30/05/2005

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