Technofile: Well it had to happen sooner or later. Once hard drives started turning up in music players like iPods, it was only a matter of time before they'd start turning up all over the place.
Next week palmOne, which pioneered the mass-market digital diary a few years ago with the Palm Pilot, releases a device aimed at business people who really do want to carry everything around in their pocket.
The LifeDrive is billed as a "Mobile Manager" since, with a 4GB hard drive, it will be able to hold everything from PowerPoint presentations to Word documents to e-mails - but you'll also be able to carry around photos of the family and music files too.
The handheld PC manufacturer launches the LifeDrive Mobile Manager on May 18th. The €384 device will also have a touch-sensitive colour screen, with Bluetooth and 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless networking.
The LifeDrive will be slightly larger than palmOne's latest high-end model, the Tungsten T5. Users will be able to plug it into the USB port on a desktop or laptop and have the microdrive appear as a removable drive, so transferring files should be relatively quick. It will also have an SD card slot for additional, removable storage.
The LifeDrive's 320-by- 480-pixel display will support both portrait and landscape modes, and offer full-screen video playback. The hard drive will be able to store up to eight hours of video.
Page Murray, palmOne vice-president of marketing, says palmOne's research has found that while business functions were highly valued by its customers, people wanted a lot more capabilities - and that required a big memory boost.
PalmOne says the Mobile Manager isn't aimed at either the existing handheld PC market or the laptop luggers. It's aimed at smartphones which can run a digital diary and collect e-mail, but don't tend to have the ability to hold large amounts of data.
The best storage capability you'll get out of a smartphone right now is about 1GB. Nokia has just launched a phone with a 4GB hard drive, but it's designed mainly to just play music. So the LifeDrive could be the solution highly mobile business people have been looking for.
The LifeDrive Mobile Manager will run the new Palm OS Garnet, and comes with software for handling Microsoft Office files, photos and music. It may even end up as a competitor for the iPod.
