hyalineskies

Tomorrow is the official release date for PalmOne’s much-awaited “LifeDrive”, first called the LifeDrive, then the Tungsten X, and then the LifeDrive again (if you’re following PalmInfocenter’s chronology.) Anyone on the Palm OS (or even gadgetry) side of things has heard about the LifeDrive, but few know a decent amount about it. I’m going to compile some information here before I go on about throwing the LifeDrive at the hp iPAQ hx4700.

Let’s first look at the current line of Palm/PalmOne devices. We have the consumer-grade Zire and the business-grade Tungsten. The Zire was first released as a monochrome model, the Zire. I know that that’s a bit redundant, but it makes sense when you look at today’s Zire line: it’s more than just a crappy old monochrome handheld. Essentially, the Zire was a repackaged Palm m100, a device which I believe was fairly useless from a profitability (and usability) perspective.

The Tungsten was actually something halfway great when it was released. It all started with the original Tungsten T, the first Palm OS 5 (known to us as “Garnet”) device and the first Palm OS device with an ARM architecture processor. This successor to the ultrapopular Palm m515 (which, I am convinced, is the best handheld that Palm has ever released; I still have my m515 and will not rid myself of it anytime soon.) People loved the Tungsten. Palm, now PalmOne, continued with the Tungsten line, releasing a lower-end business model called the Tungsten E which became PalmOne’s best-selling handheld. They kept the T-series alive as well, creating the fairly useless Tungsten T2, and then, finally, the Tungsten T3, which I owned but never used due to its bulk.

The Tungsten T3, unlike the original rock-solid T, suffered from some serious quality control issues: screws fell out of the case, the slider would, well, stop sliding, and the screens would sometimes just die. The Palm OS camp was a bit sick of the T3 even though the device wasn’t a half bad PDA. They wanted more, and they wanted it in a thinner case. Palm responded with the utterly lacklustre Tungsten T5, which was pretty much a Tungsten T3 with NVRAM (Non-Volatile Memory) in a Tungsten E case. Many say that it should have been called the Tungsten E2 , but, in hindsight, this should be called the Tungsten F: one such reason is that it really is more advanced than the E-series, and the other reason being the letter’s correspondence with profanity I won’t utilise here to keep whatever little journalistic integrity that I may possess.

Needless to say, the T5 was a flop. It still ran the same OS 5 we’d seen 2 years earlier. It didn’t add anything new and actually took away features such as the voice recorder. To add insult to injury, PalmOne still didn’t include 802.11b in the device - something Sony did a year and a half before in the Palm OS market, and a feature standard on all Windows Mobile devices in the price bracket. It was at this point that I speculated the death of PalmOne. In December of that year I said I was done with my T3 and was moving on. PalmInfocenter was on fire with complaints from the Palm OS enthusiasts.

History was to repeat itself, it seems. PalmOne heard the complaints of its users much like they did in 2001 with the m505 (what an awful device that was) and fixed them. Instead of releasing a Tungsten T6, however, they decided to spin off the handheld and keep the T5 as a business workhorse. The result? The LifeDrive Mobile Manager, known to the most of us as simply the “LifeDrive”.

When I first heard the specifications on the device, I thought it was some type of artists’ utopian mockup. After all, the LifeDrive actually contained a drive. We’ve seen the little 4-gigabyte drive before in the ultra-trendy Apple iPod Mini, but never in any handheld, Windows Mobile or Palm OS. They gave us a 320×480 screen again (taking on most PDAs in resolution aside from the few 640×480 Pocket PCs). It also has - surprise surprise - built in 802.11b and Bluetooth. In other words, it might actually be competent.

I know that you may be saying “oh! oh! It’s still OS 5!”, but you need to step back for a second and see just how long Garnet has been around. Developers have had to work around Garnet’s single-threaded mess for three years now, and we’re actually getting really pretty good at it. The API has been extended and hacked not only by PalmSource but by the third-party developers for so long now that 5.4 isn’t anywhere close to the same operating system it was on the Tungsten T in 2002. Let’s face it: OS 6 is a flop, and I sure hope that OS 7 is on the way. Note to PalmSource: your OS development cycle is longer than the cycle it takes for Microsoft to release a copy of Windows. Yes, Windows, for the desktop PC.

Now that we’ve some background, let’s pit the LifeDrive up against the hp iPaq hx4700, a competent Windows Mobile device. The hx, in my opinion, is the flagship Windows Mobile device, costing a stratospheric $599. First, we’ll go physical.

LifeDrive’s dimensions: 4.76 x 2.87 x 0.74
hp iPaq’s dimensions: 5.17 x 3.03 x .59 in.

They’re fairly comparable, the iPaq being nearly half of an inch longer and a quarter of an inch wider, while the LifeDrive being a quarter of an inch thicker. I’d honestly rather have the thicker device.

Let’s now hit up the tech specs: power, processing speed, expansion, and data space.

As for Power, the LifeDrive is rumored to have a 416MHz Intel XScale processor, a 4GB internal hard drive, a non-removable battery, and, of course, WiFi and bluetooth. The only user-accessible expansion will be via SD/MMC.

The iPaq has WiFi and Bluetooth as well, but it’s running the 624MHz Intel PXA270. It’s got RAM and ROM for data storage, 128MB and 64MB respectively, with 84MB of ROM available to the user, giving the user roughly 148MB of storage. The hx has expansion via CompactFlash (technically you could buy a 4GB Microdrive for an extra $200, bringing the device price to $800) as well as SD/MMC. Your connectivity includes the same Wifi/Bluetooth standard. The one thing that the iPaq really has over the LifeDrive is the ability to remove batteries, which is a necessity on the run with such high-powered devices. So far, the devices are pretty comparable: Windows CE is a bit… “demanding” on system resources compared to Palm OS Garnet, so I would assume that in everyday speed testing the device processors are actually pretty equivalent given their OS differences.

The only other massive difference in these devices is the screen: the iPaq has an absolutely gorgeous 640×480 (or 480×640, depending upon rotation) transflective LCD, while the LifeDrive gets by with 320×480. In all honesty, I’ve worked on both VGA Windows Mobile devices and the 320×480 screen on the Palm OS devices, and I’d have to say that I’m fairly indifferent. The 640×480 screen on the Windows Mobile devices is more of a numerical issue than a practical one; 640×480 on the Windows device is equivalent to 320×480 on a Palm OS device. If you’ve got really bad eyes, then I guess you may want the Windows Mobile device. If you’ve bad eyes and want 4GB of storage, you may want to save $300 and just buy a LifeDrive.

With the rather late release of the LifeDrive, I feel that Palm might be trying to come back and fight Windows Mobile a bit more than they have been for the past few years: we’re back on a hardware platform that seems reminiscent of 2002. Palm had the Tungsten T with its 125MHz OMAP while there were iPaq H3600 series devices with 206+ MHz StrongARM processors, and yet they were considered fairly equivalent. Can the LifeDrive keep Palm in the race? We know the Treo is losing only to the Symbian “smartphone”, which really isn’t much of a PDA at all. Maybe, just maybe, if tomorrow shows that Palm hasn’t created another “Tungsten F”, the state of the PDA economy can be restored to the way it was when I really loved development more than I do now.