January 12, 2007, Newsletter Issue #39: PDAs With Hard Drives

Tip of the Week

There was no such thing as a PDA with a hard drive until recently. It was all RAM and ROM memory, expandable with digital cards. But this kept storage capacity down. Even without a hard drive, PDAs were attractive for their durability. Then Palm came out with the Lifedrive Mobile Manager. The Lifedrive has 65 MB of RAM, and incorporates a Hitachi microdrive, similar to those found in some expansion cards. By the way, these card-based microdrives have been useable in Pocket PCs for years, effectively giving them similar capabilities to the Lifedrive.
The jury's still out on this innovation. The built-in storage capabilities are nice, especially for photos or MP3s. But for Palm addicts used to instantly accessing their information through RAM, it takes some getting used to the short delay of pulling it off a hard drive. Then there's the question of durability -- hard drives crash, especially under rough treatment.
Bottom line: The Palm Lifedrive brings a 4 GB hard drive to the PDA, but you'll trade speed and battery life for storage capacity.

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