The Palm LifeDrive was a good idea, but possibly ahead of its time. It was discontinued just over a year ago. According to some sources it was discontinued because it didn’t meet the 2007 European Union lead-free requirements.

For those who may have never heard of the Palm LifeDrive, here is a recap:
The Palm LifeDrive was Introduced in May 2005 as the first of the Palm Mobile Media Manager category of products. It has a 16-bit color, 3.7-inch-diagonal 480×320 pixel screen, and is powered by a 416 MHz Intel PXA270 processor running Palm OS (Garnet) version 5.4.8. So far the specs could be for any number of high-end handheld computers. True to its name though, the LifeDrive has a built in 4 Gigabyte hard drive (3.85GB user available) and 64MB of internal memory (55MB user available). The LifeDrive was one of the first Palm PDAs to feature both Bluetooth and 802.11b wireless.

The idea with the mobile media manager was that you could put all of your media (photos, music and videos) on the Palm. You could create slideshows with background music. It was a Palm PDA device converged with a media player.

There were a couple of problems though. One of the main problems was caused by the hard drive. Although one with a fast spin up time had been chosen, it was not fast enough for some users. Part of the drive was portioned off to act as non-volatile RAM. There was a definite lag whenever an icon was pressed or an action started. After a firmware update or two the lag was reduced substantially. Some clever third party company offered a service where they would replace the hard drive with a 4GB Compact Flash Card – effectively turning the LifeDrive into a “LifeFlash”. This apparently worked quite well.

Since the LifeDrive has been discontinued, Palm has not released another high end handheld-only device. The Palm TX now fills that spot but lacks a built-in microphone and an external LED to indicate charging or device status.

Posted on February 17th, 2008 by mervyn