palmOne LifeDrive orders are
being taken by Amazon.com.
Initial deliveries may take up to two weeks.
[ Photo: Amazon.com ].

Congratulations to palmOne for finally taking the official wraps off the LifeDrive Mobile Manager. This is clearly an organizational tool for people who have a lot of media (digital files) that they want to carry around. In spite of this, I'm always a bit concerned when a see a device like the LifeDrive and I cannot visualize one or more applications for which I would use it.

I've been checking out the reviews that have been published already today. Everyone who reads gadget blogs knows that leaks about this product have been springing out from everywhere for weeks, but clearly a few of the handheld-oriented sites have gotten pre-release units in exchange for signing Non Disclosure Agreements.

One of the better reviews I've read so far is the PalmOne LifeDrive Review on BargainPDA.com by Adama Brown. I think it gives a well rounded view of the LifeDrive and I recommend that you read it whether you are interested in the product or not. Here are a couple of snippets that illustrate the review's depth:

To support its power hungry microdrive and WiFi radio, the Lifedrive packs in a 1660 milliamp-hour battery. While relatively large compared to the 1100 mAh battery in the T5, I would have liked to see an even larger capacity given the extremely draining nature of a spinning hard disk. This is doubly important for non-multimedia use....

The biggest feature of the Lifedrive, the 4 GB internal hard drive, is a mixed blessing. I love the huge storage capability, which offers a lot of different options. But the performance hit in both speed and battery life is disappointing. Still, if you want major storage, this is the only way to go on Palm OS....

Even if the LifeDrive turns out to be a slow seller in the market, this is a good step forward by palmOne in the sense that they are trying to add features that have only been widely available on the Pocket PC platform for some time.