I Hate My Life(Drive)

Some people love to hate “the bad guy” on their favorite TV show.  Others love to hate rival sports teams.  Me?  I love to hate a match pair of Palm OS devices: the Palm LifeDrive and the Sony Clie NZ90.

Big Ideas Gone Wrong

Both the LifeDrive and the Clie NZ90 looked as if they were going to take the mobile computing world by storm.  They both had cutting edge features.  Well-regarded device manufacturers developed them.  However, somewhere along the way, both devices ended up being a bust in the eyes of many enthusiasts.

The Sony Clie NZ90 was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2003 and later launched in February.  Sony had placed a lot of emphasis on the new high-end features of the latest entertainment Clie as evident in the Sony press release . 

"Rivaling the gadgetry found in modern day spy movies, the CLIÉ NZ90 handheld integrates a feature uncommon in the handheld market these days: excitement," said Russell Paik, Sony Electronics' vice president for handheld marketing. "It's a turning point in the way handheld devices are defined." 

Some of the cutting-edge features found in the NZ90 included a two-megapixle digital camera, Wi-Fi support with an optional expansion card, and more multimedia features than you can shake a stick at. 

Palm’s LifeDrive Mobile Manager, released in May of 2005, was intended to be the device for your digital mobile life.  The LifeDrive was intended to be a device the bridged the gap between business and entertainment.  Providing applications for work and play in a single device with 4GB of built-in storage space and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless networking would help achieve this goal.

Additionally the LifeDrive featured a new application called Camera Companion.  Camera Companion was a little application that waited for a Secure Digital card to be inserted into the card slot.  When a card insert was detected, Camera Companion gives the user three choices for the pictures and video one the card: copy them to the internal hard drive, copy them to a computer, or view the content directly from the card.  The LifeDrive was the tool that allowed you to have it all: features, storage, and applications all in a single intelligent hard disk drive. 

According to the Palm press release , the LifeDrive Mobile Manager allowed customers to “easily carry virtually all of their essential desktop computer files and folders. Crucial documents can be set to update automatically at each HotSync(R) operation, and users can receive secure wireless email with attachments whenever they are within range of a Wi-Fi connection or by connecting via a compatible Bluetooth phone.”

The Best Laid Plans

With all of these great features, both devices should have been run-away hits with Sony and Palm customers.  Hindsight is 20/20, and we now are able to see what exactly when wrong with both of these high-end flops.

The biggest turn off for many people has to be the high price.  The Clie NZ90 weighed in at a whopping $800.  The LifeDrive had a $500 price tag.  In retail marketing, the $500 price tag is the tipping point for mass consumption.  A few dollars less and the device will sell.  For a few dollars more, and people think twice before purchasing.

On the Clie, another serious flaw was the lack of available memory.  The NZ90 only had 11MB of usable of RAM.  For a device that was designed to be an entertainment platform, only having 11MB of on board memory seems to be a bit skimpy.  Being short on RAM required any serious user to purchase a Memory Stick and store applications and documents on the expansion card.  Even with applications and documents stored on the card, I often ran into out of memory errors when trying to use PicselViewer to read Adobe Acrobat documents.  Some of my other pet peeves with the Clie are the missing screen rotation and compact flash (CF) card drivers.  Both issues had to be resolved by third-party developers.  Sadly, the Sony DSP audio processing chip would only appear in the last few Clie handhelds.  The addition of this chip would have allowed the Clie to essentially remain off while still playing .mp3 audio files – a perfect feature for an entertainment device.

Lastly, that Wi-Fi access that was talked about in the Sony press release would also set you back an additional $100, pushing the total purchase price well over $1,000 if you also purchased the Wi-Fi card along with the Clie and a Memory Stick. 

Palm also had their fair share of implementation problems with the LifeDrive.  While it does have Wi-Fi, a rotating screen, and 64MB of storage space called Non-Volatile File System (NVFS), the LifeDrive is, in my opinion, incredibly unstable.  Third-party developers often had trouble adapting their software to the new NVFS storage system.  The Wi-Fi communications stack on the LifeDrive was unreliable and crashes every time I use it.  This is even after Palm rolled out two maintenance ROM upgrades.

On the day that the LifeDrive was launched, the news item that many mainstream news outlets and Palm enthusiast sites where carrying was not just that Palm released a new PDA, but that the hard drive lag time could be a serious problem for some users.  The problem stemmed from the time required to load data from the hard drive and into the NVFS memory area.  New York Times technology columnist David Pogue came down hard on the LifeDrive’s lag problem.  In the end, it is my feeling that the LifeDrive should have been left in the oven to cook for another 2-4 months to really work out some of the stability issues.

In Conclusion

It is easy to point out the flaws in devices that are no longer in production.  However, when it comes to execution on these designs, real attention needs to be paid about the details as a measure of when a device is ready for launch.

The single biggest measure that customers are holding these devices up to is stability.  Many customers of the Treo 700-series devices that I have talked to in recent days say that they love the Treo, but it absolutely needs to just work.  No crashing.  No lagging when loading large databases.  And there should be no mysterious Bluetooth connection problems.

With rumors that Palm is working on an upgrade to the current version of the Palm OS, many Palm customers are looking forward to the level of stability of Palm OS 5.2.1, the last version of Palm OS to be released before the spin off of PalmSource as an independent company.

What do you think?  Let us know in the 1SRC forums.