TruthorFallacy

That was the REAL David Pogue! I emailed him about the criticism that his review was generating and pointed him to this forum for review. The following is my email to him and hie response: Hi David, As a potential PalmOne LifeDrive customer, I read and viewed your video review of the LifeDrive with great interest, since I think you are a great tech news and review correspondent who tries to inject some humor in potentially dry and boring subject matter. I especially like watching you on the CBS Sunday Morning show. However, in comparing your review with about 10 other reviews of this device, one MAJOR discrepency has come up. This discrepancy has to do with the "six second lag" of the LifeDrive. The following is a quote from your review of the LifeDrive: "The most serious cause for pause, though, is the LifeDrive's unfortunate case of narcolepsy. To save power, the hard drive stops spinning between uses. That's fine. What's not so fine, however, is that it takes six seconds to spin up again and feed its data into the palmtop's memory so you can use it. As a result, your work is frequently interrupted by maddening, six-second visits to the dead zone. Everything is frozen on the screen, no button works and your workflow comes to a crashing halt. There's no progress bar or "wait" cursor, either - only a little light at the top of the case tells you: "Please hold; your work is very important to us." These lapses are particularly frequent just after you've turned on the LifeDrive for the very first time. Open the calendar: six seconds. Switch to Week view: six seconds. Open the address book: six seconds. Back to the Home screen: six seconds." This comment has created quite a stir in the Palm community. All the other reviews I have read talked about a typical 1-2 second delay in switching between applications. I have even demoed a production unit at a CompUSA myself and experienced a typical 1-2 second delay. A consistent 6 second delay in a PDA would be unacceptable to most people including me. I am afraid that your review has scared away potential LifeDrive customers and has tarnished PalmOne's reputation in releasing a flagship product with a serious flaw. I am wondering if you were given either a pre-production unit or a defective unit for your review? If either is the case, I would hope you consider obtaining a shipping unit and run through your speed tests again? I feel that a lot of people act (or not act) on your reviews and I would hate to see a company and product discredited because you were given a faulty product to review. The following are some shortcuts related to this issue for further clarification. Thanks for your time, Lance Article on PDABuzz.com: http://tinyurl.com/ad98g Tech Forum Threads: http://tinyurl.com/9mzu9 http://tinyurl.com/8atgp David Pogues response: The 6-second delay is no myth. Please watch my online video to see it in action! As I wrote in the review, you won't see it if you're switching between 3 small apps; it keeps everything in RAM. It is therefore NOT, as you wrote, "consistent." It is, as I wrote, occasional. But open a big Word document (which will flush most other stuff out of RAM), scroll a couple times, edit. Now try going back to the Home screen, say, or switch calendar views--you'll see the lag. I am also able to trigger it with other "large" moves like visiting a couple of graphics-laden Web pages in Blazer; when I go back to other corners of the software, I hit the 6-second spinup. You'll also see it with just about EVERYTHING when you first turn on the unit after a reset or power down. PalmOne confirmed it with me on the phone, and explained it as I did in the column. We even confirmed that I have the shipping firmware version. That said, I suppose it's conceivable that there's something "special" about my unit, but I doubt it. Hope this helps, and please feel free to pass my note along to whatever boards! David Pogue Technology columnist, The New York Times http://www.davidpogue.com http://www.missingmanuals.com ================================== Latest books: "iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual" "iMovie HD & iDVD: The Missing Manual" "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual" "Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual," 2nd Ed. "Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual," 2nd Ed.