My next PDA?

The PDA/laptop replacement market is getting interesting again. Barring a hardware failure, it’ll be a little while yet before I look to replace my Tungsten T, but when I do I’m going to have some interesting devices to choose from.

PalmInfocenter has the first detailed review I’ve read of the palmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager, which is essentially a moderately upscale Palm PDA with a hard disk. My first reaction is that the price (£329) is a little higher than I’m comfortable paying for a PDA, but when I consider how much I’d be prepared in principle to pay for an iPod - which is, at best a dual function device for my purposes (i.e. an MP3 player & portable Firewire backup drive) - I can certainly see how I could be persuaded that a device I’d use solidly day in, day out for three years could be well worth that sort of money. The real drawback to the LifeDrive, rather predictably, is the battery life:

For my general reviewing purposes, I was able to get about 4 and a half hours out of a full charge. This included moderate web surfing over WiFi, lots of Bejeweled 2, using the PIM applications and listening to a few track’s (sic) from the HDD. palmOne’s official numbers are with 45 minutes of use per day, one would get about 2-2.5 days of use. Because the HDD does not need a charge to store your data you will not loose memory content’s when the power is empty and the device has a longer keep alive time.

Over the last 4 weeks I’ve used my Tungsten T for an average of 2 hours 47 minutes per day, with the maximum daily usage being 5 hours 48 minutes. My daily routine typically involves a mix of using DateBk5 for the usual calendar/to do/address list/notepad-type tasks, reading HTML documents using Plucker, listening to MP3s off an SD card, using Handyshopper to keep track of my shopping list and tracking my expenses with PocketMoney. That’s not an unreasonable mix of activities for a moderately powerful PDA. I realise that the hard disk would preserve my data when the power ran down, but the point is that I want to be able to access that data all day if necessary. I can just about manage that with my Tungsten T (though a lot of MP3-listening really taxes the battery) but the quoted battery life of a LifeDrive just doesn’t come close to meeting my needs. Which is a real shame, because otherwise it’s a tempting package.

By way of a contrast, the Nokia 770 isn’t a PDA at all. However, considering that it’s a Linux-based tablet computer which comes with Bluetooth and WiFi, has a nice big screen and uses an MMC card for mass storage I’d anticipate that after a year in the wild all sorts of PDA-type applications will have been ported to it. If Nokia turn out to be the company that establishes a tablet-based form factor as one consumers are willing to buy, I can easily see the 770’s successors turning into enormously useful general-purpose portable computers.

[LifeDrive review via PalmAddict]