LifeDrive Fondle Report by Kirvin

[Jeff Kirvin]

Okay, took longer to finish than I expected, and at 2500 words it still not a full review, but here it is:

http://www.solomedia.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1305

[Joel]

Finally, my kind of review. Great work, Jeff.

[mareuter]

that's a great review - thanks Jeff!

[MrNako]

Nice review! It looks like you work for PalmOne since every single flaw that the LD has you make it look like a feature. :p

[Jeff Kirvin]

Nice review! It looks like you work for PalmOne since every single flaw that the LD has you make it look like a feature. :p
erp.

Thanks?

[MrNako]

erp.

Thanks?

LOL... I say this because everything that has been said out there like the LD getting hot and the long soft resets, etc. you make it sound so nice that I want to buy one.

[Jeff Kirvin]

Well, that's my point. Unless you're made of ice, it doesn't really get hot, just slightly warm. And the long resets aren't any more annoying than they are on my T5. And the lag is a MYTH.

Just calling it like I see it...

[archangel]

Nice review! It looks like you work for PalmOne since every single flaw that the LD has you make it look like a feature. :p

Jeff does come across like a fanboy or to use his terms a wingnut from time to time. He gets most things right though. :)

However, if Palm came out with a PDA with no screen Jeff would probably put a positive spin on it. Best battery life on any PDA ever, no screen to damage! He just likes Palm PDAs and looks for the upside.

Lifedrive is the PDA I wanted that as usual was screwed up by PalmOne. Terrible battery life and the fact the HDD has to spin up for everything including rotating the screen is just crap. If anything it confirmed just how good of a purchase my Tapwave Zodiac was. Now that fontsmoother works on the Tapwave I have no interest in Palmone.

[Jeff Kirvin]

Jeff does come across like a fanboy or to use his terms a wingnut from time to time. He gets most things right though. :)

Yeah! Wait...

However, if Palm came out with a PDA with no screen Jeff would probably put a positive spin on it. Best battery life on any PDA ever, no screen to damage! He just likes Palm PDAs and looks for the upside.

And what's wrong with choosing to focus on the positive?

Lifedrive is the PDA I wanted that as usual was screwed up by PalmOne. Terrible battery life and the fact the HDD has to spin up for everything including rotating the screen is just crap. If anything it confirmed just how good of a purchase my Tapwave Zodiac was. Now that fontsmoother works on the Tapwave I have no interest in Palmone.

Interesting. Most of the rants I've seen against the LD share this theme. I'm not saying you're doing it, but I'm really starting to wonder about brand bias in this market. I see people define themselves as an "avid Looxer" or "Clie fanatic" and I wonder why. Many of the complaints I see about the LD seem like thinly veiled rationalizations for why people are better off keeping the device they already have (even if it's something horrible like the T3; the battery life on that is a joke).

I don't invest my identity in my current choice of device. My T5 is my 19th PDA, and I've owned and loved devices from Palm, Handspring, Tapwave, Toshiba, ViewSonic, HP, Compaq and HTC (haven't owned a Dell yet... hmm...). I'm not a Palm cheerleader, I'm a device cheerleader. I love these gadgets and I want to see the best in them and help others do the same.

Gonzo mobile tech. Hunter Thompson was right; objectivity in journalism is an illusion. But while I wear my opinions on my sleeve, I will always tell you the truth.

[archangel]

Interesting. Most of the rants I've seen against the LD share this theme. I'm not saying you're doing it, but I'm really starting to wonder about brand bias in this market. I see people define themselves as an "avid Looxer" or "Clie fanatic" and I wonder why. Many of the complaints I see about the LD seem like thinly veiled rationalizations for why people are better off keeping the device they already have (even if it's something horrible like the T3; the battery life on that is a joke).


I really have nothing against Palmone. I had my complaints about the T5 granted (I just thought Wi-Fi should be standard at that price point and you didn't), but I have liked most of their recent PDAs especially the Zire and E line. The thing I wanted most was a multimedia release from them like the Lifedrive. It finally gets delivered and it just has too many short comings to get.

The real problem right now is battery technology. When is battery technology going to catch up with everything else? Devices have improved by leaps and bounds, but we are stuck with the same batteries from 10 years ago. Until someone jumps that hurdle there is just so far small mobile devices can go.

[Festus440]

Batteries have improved but not at a fast enough rate.
For example, the lithium polymer batteries now used in all of these devices recharge faster and have almost no memory problems.

But there always seems to be something great "just around the corner".
For example, like in this news release from Toshiba 2 months ago:
http://www.toshiba.com/taec/press/dmfc_05_270.shtml

They say commercial products in 2006, but fuel cells were supposed to be here by now also :cool:

[timepilot84]

Lifedrive is the PDA I wanted that as usual was screwed up by PalmOne. Terrible battery life and the fact the HDD has to spin up for everything including rotating the screen is just crap.

1) the battery life isn't that bad. Two days without a charge isn't going to kill you. How long does it need to last?

2) If the only effect that spinning up the HDD has is on battery life, and it is (the delay is negligible) then spinning up the HDD is irrelevant, unless you have some phobia towards spinning magnetic disks in which case I apologize for antagonizing you.

[lank5893]

How can any one say that the LD lag is a myth or negligible. Sure, it may not be as long as 5-6 seconds but there is a lag. What is acceptable to you might not be acceptable to me, and even 1-2 secs is too long. I have tried WM devices in the past and I keep coming back to Palm because of one word, INSTANTANEOUS. With the LD you have that sometimes but sometimes you don't. It is not a myth and certaintly not negligible to me. Jeff, I'm glad you put a positive spin on your review so as to counter-act some of the negative reviews, but let's not go over board. Talking about how the rise in temperature is a great thing and makes you feel good is a little much. There are way too many anti-Palm people out there but being too Pro-Palm is just as bad IMHO!

Lucan

[archangel]

1) the battery life isn't that bad. Two days without a charge isn't going to kill you. How long does it need to last?

2) If the only effect that spinning up the HDD has is on battery life, and it is (the delay is negligible) then spinning up the HDD is irrelevant, unless you have some phobia towards spinning magnetic disks in which case I apologize for antagonizing you.

Two Days? Not sure how you use a PDA, but I would be suprised to get three or four hours out of the LD, much less two days of use. I'm going to use the thing for what it was designed for. Movies, music and Wi-Fi. The battery it has doesn't cut it for those uses.

The LD should have been designed with the HDD as a storage drive. Include 32-64MB of RAM for actually storing and running most programs on and save the HDD for all the media files. It is silly to have the hard drive spin up for every single function of the device and though the delay isn't as bad as originally thought its really silly to have it happen for something like turning the screen. This is a $500 device that apparently Palm is trying to make a huge profit on. They cut some corners they didn't have to IMO to make it more profitable.

Hopefully Palmone will address this and the LD2 will be a device worth getting. A portable multimedia device like this is useless if you have plug it in several times a day and charge it. Even the PSP which was bashed for its battery life seems to have double the use of the LD.

[Mojo_LA]

OLED screens will allow a big improvement in battery life. They use about a third the power of LCD and we all know the LCD is the biggest drain on the battery!

Phones, cameras and small MP3 players are getting them now... I would guess that next year we'll start seeing PDAs with OLED screens and I wouldn't be surprised to see double the battery life based on that alone.

[timepilot84]

Two Days?

I've been charging it up every couple of days. I use it for probably 3-4 hours a day, maybe a third of that online.

It is silly to have the hard drive spin up for every single function of the device

It doesn't spin up for every single function of the device. So you don't like it on aesthetic grounds? Fine. I like it based on practical grounds. To each his own. (I'm glad to hear you don't actually have a spinning disk phobia :P )

[palmjob]

In all honesty, this thing has more intial problems than any Clie (3) or Psion (2) I've ever owned or used. I mean, just out of the box and after charging the battery I had to deal with 2 hard resets and Hotsynch problems as well as the other issues. While this thing does have many positive capabilities it just doesn't knock my socks off like the Revo or NX-80 did. The negatives have def soured my experience. I feel that Palm has released the LD about 2-3 months early. They are using the GM retail philosophy of consumer product development and QA and look where THAT has gotten them.
As a postscript, as I was purchasing the extended warranty at the desk at CompUSA I listened to a woman returning her new (I believe) Zire 72 for a HP device because "it was too hard to figure out."
PPS - Jeff, does PalmOne have good benefits plan? JUST KIDDING!!!

[timepilot84]

The only LifeDrive specific problem I've had is the weird "out of memory" error that goes away if you load a suitably large application. All of the trouble I've had with the LD in terms of soft-resetting have been traced to legacy applications and/or conduits. Uninstalling all of the software that I used with my T5 and installing only the versions of Docs 2 Go that came with the LD (and the available upgrade) has gotten rid of all the soft resetting for me.

I had a defective LD that I exchanged last weekend, and I was sure to do a clean install of everything on the device from Palm Desktop on up, and haven't had a single soft reset since then.