weekend.life.driver

I'm supposed to write a full review of Hamachi but I guess I'd blog about my latest gear acquisition first lest I forget to write about it again. Besides, I'm not finished evaluating Hamachi just yet. Anyway, after 2 weeks of deciding and about a week of 'PDA-less' existence, I finally submitted myself to the urge of buying one. I phoned microwarehouse(palmOne distributor in Davao) and inquired about their latest offering,The LifeDrive. Palm (they already dropped the PalmOne moniker guys) came up with a so called 'mobile manager', a new line of handhelds (the LifeDrive being the first product in its category) that basically 'carries all the essentials of your busy life and use them as you will' in other words, listen to what all the Palm users have been wishing/ranting about for years and slap a 4GB harddrive in the mix :D



The new device sports built-in WiFi (802.11b) and Bluetooth (yeah, finally they listened) it uses the same 416Mhz processor as the Tungsten T5 and IMHO, has the best form factor that Palm has ever released. Audio output coming from its internal speakers is considerably better than all the older Palm units, and pairing this with a set of very good Senheiser earphones would make the LifeDrive a very capable audio/mediaplayer (it supports *.asf movies too). Although not a direct competitor for the iPod but considering that the LifeDrive is more than the usual PDA gives it a more compelling reason to buy. I would go to the extent of saying that the LifeDrive is the swiss knife of the PalmOS-based PDAs, but like the usual swiss knives we use, its not necessarily the best tool for a certain job.

The LifeDrive's main advantage is its internal 4Gb harddrive...imagine the number of documents, audio, movies and other data that you could store, on the other hand, that is also the LifeDrive's achilles heel...while older PalmOS-based PDAs are known to be lightning-fast in loading applications in memory, the LifeDrive lags tremendously, of course some users will disagree with my statement, but anyway I was a Tungsten C user so permit me to say that it was, as I have experienced, very slow for my taste. The system waits for the harddrive to spin so there really is a considerable delay. There is a 3rd party application called Sharkcache that is supposed to fix this, I downloaded a demo copy online and played around with it for a few hours, Unfortunately the application is limited to only 4MB of ''cache"(out of 4GB), there are reports of users getting huge improvements in application load times but in my case I have to be honest that the speed boost was not noticeable.

The LifeDrive is basically a very good concept that was poorly implemented. Bugs are always common on a first generation device, but when you pay Php 30,500 ($1=PHP 55) for a handheld you'd expect it to be worth every penny.

I eventually decided to return the unit and got a T5 instead. I finally convinced myself that I was better off using a universal keyboard + T5 + WiFi card + Nokia 6230, very bulky I know but they all fit in my pocket and more importantly it works...better than I expected :D