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| Advertisement ID | : | 1556154 |
| Category | : | Cellphone / Cellular / Mobile Phone / Smartphone |
| Location | : | Makati City, Metro Manila |
| Ads Classification | : | For Sale |
| Regular Price Now Only Save | : : : | |
| Condition | : | 2nd Hand (Used) |
| Warranty | : | Personal Warranty |
| Date Updated | : | October 9, 2009 (posted August 10, 2009) |
| Short URL | : | http://sulit.com.ph/1556154 |
BUY NOW PRICE IS NEGOTIABLE. PLEASE TEXT 0922-8496660 FOR QUERIES.
The LifeDrive is the first member of Palm's new Mobile Manager handheld category, aimed at those who want "Digital everything": Photos, MP3s, videos, lots and lots of documents and the usual PIM applications to keep track of appointments, contacts and tasks. Yes, many PDAs can handle these tasks, but the LifeDrive sets itself apart by providing you with a whopping 4 gigs of storage and an extremely easy way to get all these kinds of media onto the device. The desktop software, LifeDrive Manager, is your one stop spot for managing files on the LifeDrive. It handles file conversion for you, can keep documents in several folders on your PC in sync and can even act as a repository for digital camera images if your camera uses SD cards. You can purchase the same 4 gig MicroDrive used in the LifeDrive for Pocket PCs with CF slots and get the same amount of storage and media support, but the LifeDrive attempts to do one better by making it faster via a USB 2.0 connection and by making it downright simple to get those gigs of data, be it multimedia files or Office files onto the device. This brings to mind some of the high end Sony Clies, though lacking in sheer storage capacity, they were multimedia powerhouses that handled MP3 playback, photo viewing and video playback well. However, Sony's desktop software required that you use several different Sony apps to handle the various conversions. This meant users had to learn several different programs and use them separately to get a variety of multimedia file types onto the Clie. Thus, high end Clies were for power users and those who didn't mind the extra effort. The LifeDrive offers the same functionality in an extremely simple user interface that anyone can master. And of course, with 4 gigs of storage, this new breed of Palm device makes a much better portable MP3 player and video player than the Clie.
So what about these 4 gigs of storage? The LifeDrive uses a 4 gig Hitachi MicroDrive, which is a miniature hard drive designed for use in mobile devices. It has relatively low power consumption and is designed to handle bumps and shakes well, despite the moving parts. Like any hard drive, data stored there is persistent, which means that it requires no power to preserve its contents: if the battery runs dry, your data remains intact, unlike data stored in RAM on PDAs.
Palm isn't the first handheld manufacturer to incorporate a MicroDrive into a PDA; Sharp did it in late 2004 with their Zaurus SL-C3000 Linux handheld which more closely resembles a miniature laptop. However, the C3000 is sold in Japan only, and is available in the US from a handful of importers for nearly twice the price of the LifeDrive. Palm's syncing and desktop file management software is also much more full-featured and friendly than the venerable Zaurus'. In the end, the Zaurus is an excellent notebook replacement rather than a turnkey PDA. Outside the PDA realm, hard drive-based MP3 players like the Apple iPod mini have a MicroDrive inside and portable video players generally use 1.8" hard drives which are smaller than notebook hard drives but larger than the 1.5" MicroDrive. And there's the Archos PMA400, which is a portable media player that runs Linux and offers PDA features. However, that device is much more expensive at $799, doesn't have a photo slide show mode, doesn't support portrait mode for PDA use, and doesn't have very good WiFi performance. But it does have a 30 gig hard drive
The first PDA on the U.S. market with a hard drive, the palmOne LifeDrive ($499 direct) and in PalmOne LifeDrive Company: PalmOne Price: AU$899 is a device that digital pack rats should love. In fact, the folks at palmOne consider it a mobile manager, one of an entirely new class of handheld products. Its 4GBs of storage should be enough for almost anyone to carry all their critical documents and media. Be forewarned, though: You'll have to recharge the device frequently, and we did encounter some irritating bugs and crashes during our testing, which prevented us from awarding it even higher marks and an Editors' Choice.
The LifeDrive is designed to hold all your portable files; we filled ours with 600 MB of MP3s, a full-length movie, and a flotilla of review notes, and it was still more than half empty. (Program files must live in 64MB of RAM, but that's plenty of room for Palm OS software, which is generally pretty compact.) There's a slew of ways to get your files on and off the device, too: You can beam them over Bluetooth, drop them in via SD Card, share them using built-in 802.11b Wi-Fi, sync them from a PC with included software, or just plug the LifeDrive via USB 2.0 into any PC or Mac, where it becomes an external drive without you having to add any additional software.
PalmOne marries the LifeDrive's massive storage to a very usable set of software. You'll find DataViz DocumentsToGo 7, still the best Microsoft Office document reader/editor suite on any handheld, loaded on the product. The LifeDrive also comes with Pocket Tunes, an MP3/WMA player that supports playlists and syncs with Windows Media Player 10; a basic built-in video player; and WiFile, a sleek interface for downloading files from SMB shared drives over Wi-Fi, which we used with both PCs and Macs. Speaking of Wi-Fi, palmOne's implementation is far smoother than Microsoft's in Windows Mobile 2003 SE—you can access any available network in a few clicks.
PalmOne's Blazer browser is decent enough, allowing you to browse the Web over Wi-Fi or via a Bluetooth mobile phone connection. Web pages also look better on Blazer than they do when viewed on Pocket PCs using Pocket Explorer, with more accurate rendering of graphics and tables, though poorer frame support. Page rendering was a bit slower than we would have liked; the LifeDrive took 4, 20, and 62 seconds to render a sequence of simple, more complex, and very complex pages, whereas the 624-MHz Dell Axim X50v Pocket PC took 2, 15, and 42 seconds.
On the desktop, Palm Desktop and palmOne's Outlook connectors are newly joined by LifeDrive Manager, which lets you sync folders between your PC and PDA. Palm Desktop automatically transcodes the most popular unprotected video formats into the right size and speed for the handheld, which we realized when reviewing palmOne's Tungsten T5 and Tungsten E2. We tried MPEG1, MPEG2 and DivX files, which became full-screen MPEG4 movies at a smooth, viewable 18 frames per second. Even Mac users get some love: Although LifeDrive Manager and video transcoding don't work with Macs, you can use Palm Desktop to sync PIM data and Drive Mode to transfer files. But there remains no support for copy-protected music or video files.
We did run into several minor, annoying bugs during our testing. For instance, LifeDrive Manager crashed one of our test PCs, and we managed to crash both Pocket Tunes and the USB Drive Mode application on the handheld. Audio in the popular Palm OS–based game, Bejeweled 2, which we downloaded for testing, was often choppy. Also, some Web pages would mysteriously pause in midload for up to a minute. And Palm OS 5, which wasn't designed for multimedia, is starting to look long in the tooth. There's no system-wide volume slider, it's difficult to interrupt Web page loads in progress, and forget about running things in the background (though Pocket Tunes valiantly tries)—this is a one-thing-at-a-time machine.
Battery life is relatively short and most likely suffers due to the hard drive and the use of Wi-Fi. With Wi-Fi off, we got a little over 4 hours of PDA usage time and 3 hours of video playback. That's about half the battery life of the mid-range E2. Turning on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth dragged life down to about two and a half hours. You'll need to charge this lovely little power hog every other day or so. Fortunately, charging goes fast (zero to 95 percent in around 90 minutes) and the nonperishable RAM means your data won't vanish when your battery does get run down. In the long term, though, we suspect that battery rundowns may become more of a problem, as the battery isn't user-replaceable.
The LifeDrive's nearest competitors are the Tungsten C and the Dell Axim X50v. The Tungsten C is better for e-mail and document editing, thanks to its built-in keyboard, and the Axim's VGA screen and better video-playing software make it better for movies. On the other hand, both devices would become much more expensive than the LifeDrive if you pumped them up with equivalent storage.
For those PC geeks out there who might be wondering, the PDA's hard drive rotates at 3600 rpm, with a 12-ms average seek time and a claimed sustained data transfer rate of 4.3 to 7.2 MBps. Compared with a 1GB 32X Lexar Secure Digital card, it offers a somewhat faster estimated write speed but sucks down about nine times the power and isn't nearly as good at handling shock and temperature extremes. The advantage here is price: 4GB Microdrives currently sell for as little as $169, according to dealram.com, while 4GB CompactFlash modules cost $279 and up and 2GB Secure Digital cards, the largest, start at $193.
The LifeDrive does a lot, and it does it all pretty well. We were disappointed with the crashes we experienced during testing, but the folks at palmOne stated that they were working on fixes. So if you've felt constrained by the storage capacity of other handhelds, and if you can handle its short battery life, you might very well have found your portable digital attic in the LifeDrive.
Benchmarks:
Battery Life:
Continuous video, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on: 2 hours, 32 minutes
Continuous video, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off: 2 hours, 54 minutes
Normal use, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on: 2 hours, 38 minutes
Normal use, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off: 4 hours, 6 minutes
BUY NOW PRICE IS NEGOTIABLE. PLEASE TEXT 0922-8496660 FOR QUERIES.
| Posted by | : | NuttyCaramel |
| Member Since | : | September 6, 2008 |
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