beelan

My Lifedrive did not start off well...the first one I had was spoilt the moment I have taken it out of the box. Palm had agreed to give me a new one after I complained bitterly over the phone. Knowing that the upgrade 2.0 would help to stabilize the system, I installed the patch first before I do anything else. So far, the system runs well -- no soft reset or any problem whatsoever.

I got my Lifedrive primarily to used it as a computerized library for my collection of books saved in word documents and e-books. There is nothing wrong with my HP IPAQ but as I have growing collection of word documents -- about a thousand or so it takes a long time, sometimes as long as a minute for my IPAQ to retreive a file from my SD card.

I figure that with 4 GB hard disk, it should be faster for me to retrieve the required documents and 4 GB would last me for quite some time. I am happy to say that Lifedrive did not fail me on that even for large documents -- it only takes a few seconds to retrive/open. I have currently downloaded about 1500 word documents into my Lifedrive and it is working just fine.

I have tried to open a large word document -- about 790 pages long in actual word document -- but sadly the Lifedrive gave an error message saying that it has not enough memory to do so. I am not too perturbed over that as none of my older palms or pocket pc could open such a large document -- they could only open a document between 150 to 180 pages of word documents. Lifedrive managed to open a 390 page word document -- excellent!

But....I do have my grouses. A large part of my collection are Chinese documents. I know the CJKOS did a fairly decent job of converting the documents but they are just not as good as pocket pc. For pocket pc, the Chinese fonts are free....just download the required fonts such as MS Song from the microsoft website. For CJKOS, I have to experiment to find the 'best' font for display....for e.g., through trial and error, I have discovered that word documents saved in MingLiu fonts -- for the other types of fonts such as NSimSun just did not look well and have conversion error. And despite the claims of CJKOS, their conversion tool is just not as so powerful especially if I have a mixture of Traditional/Simplied Chinese in the same document -- I could see the complete document in my pocket pc but there would be missing words/wrong conversion in my Lifedrive. Ok....I could not blame that on Lifedrive as I believed this is the palm os fault.....but this is one thing that I missed in the pocket pc -- the ability to find a corresponding font in the word documents.

As I primarly used my Lifedrive to read -- I find that it is excellent because the huge hard disk allows me to retrieve a document fairly quickly than from reading from my SD card which can be really slow if you have hundreds of documents like I do. But for the others -- eg, mulltimedia -- screen resolution wise, my old Sony Clie is much better after running a few trailers on them -- sound wise -- my old Sony Clie performed so much better --- I could use my old Song Clie as a MP3 player as the quality of sound is good but not Lifedrive. As for the e-mail thingy.....I am not going to try -- nothing to do with Lifedrive -- I received hundreds of mails everyday -- I don't think any PDA could cope with that!

With 4 GB of hard disk -- my Lifedrive should last me for quite some time -- but I do have a craving for a larger hard disk e.g. 20 GB or so.