palmOne's Next Handheld WILL Be Called the LifeDrive

By Ed Hardy, Brighthand Editor | Tuesday, May 03, 2005 | 37216 Reads

Image Gallery

Rumors have been circulating since March about palmOne's next high-end handheld. In the beginning, this device was always referred to as the LifeDrive.

Last month, a very reliable source informed Brighthand that this device will be called the Tungsten X, and even said they had seen a model with this name printed on it.

Now, however, another very reliable source has leaked to Brighthand a palmOne PowerPoint presentation that clearly indicates that this model will indeed be called the LifeDrive.

What Happened?

It is not clear why two very reliable sources came up with two different names.

It's possible that palmOne had originally intended to call this handheld the Tungsten X, and later changed its name to LifeDrive.

What's in a Name?

This device won't be part of any of palmOne's other product lines. Apparently it will be the first in a new series.

In fact, the company goes so far as to not call this a handheld at all. According to it, its Tungsten and Zire lines are made up of handhelds, the Treo models are smartphones, while the LifeDrive is a Mobile Manager.

Overview of the LifeDrive

The rumors say that the next high-end model from palmOne will run Palm OS Garnet on a 416 MHz XScale processor.

It is not clear at this point how much RAM this handheld will have; some sources have indicated 64 MB, others just 32 MB. The PowerPoint presentation recently leaked to Brighthand does not say.

Supposedly, the LifeDrive will have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 1.1 wireless networking. Of course it will come with a web browser and email application.

It will be somewhat larger than palmOne's latest high-end model, the Tungsten T5, but it won't be as large as some rumors have indicated. The LifeDrive will be 4.7 inches tall, 2.8 inches wide, and 0.8 inches thick. It will weigh 6.8 ounces.

4 GB of Storage

The most significant feature of the LifeDrive, and the one from which it draws its name, will be its built-in Hitachi 4 GB miniature hard drive.

This model will reportedly support Drive Mode, so users can plug their handheld into the USB port on a desktop or laptop and have the microdrive appear as a removable drive.

It will support USB 2.0, so transferring files onto the microdrive should be relatively quick.

It will also have an SD card slot for additional, removable storage.

Multimedia Power

The LifeDrive will have a 320-by-480-pixel display that supports both portrait and landscape modes. It will offer full-screen video playback, and its hard drive will be able to store up to 8 hours of video, depending on how the movie is encoded.

Unlike most palmOne handhelds for the past several years, this model will not come with Real Networks' RealPlayer. Instead, it will ship with a version of NormSoft's Pocket Tunes that will be able to work with Real's Rhapsody streaming music service. In addition, Pocket Tunes is able to play MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, and WAV files.

It will come with an application called Camera Companion that will allow users to easily pull the pictures off an SD card and copy them to its internal hard drive.

But it won't be just a multimedia-oriented device. It will also come with DocumentsToGo, allowing it to work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Acrobat files.

The LifeDrive is expected to be announced in mid-May and cost about $500.