A Loaded Palm

By Wilson Rothman

In the age of iPod Minis and 2.5-lb. laptops, it was just a matter of time before somebody stuck a hard drive into a PDA. That's right: 4 GB of built-in memory is what distinguishes LifeDrive, PalmOne's first new line of handhelds in 2 1/2 years ($500; palmone.com) from competing Palms and pocket PCs. The extra memory will get you far businesswise. You can archive quite a few PowerPoint presentations, for example, and a GPS street-level map of the entire U.S. Built-in wi-fi and Bluetooth wireless networking (plus infrared and USB ports) let you juggle e-mail accounts, surf the Web and transfer files.

But the product's name is a dead giveaway that PalmOne is aiming this at people who, in fact, have lives. Drag pictures and movies into the LifeDrive Manager software, and it converts them to compatible formats, optimized to look good on the 320x480-pixel color screen. You can also load your MP3s using Windows Media Player or RealNetworks' Rhapsody software. We filled a test unit with 350 songs, more than 400 pictures and the entire feature film Garden State, and we still had more than 1 GB of space left. --By Wilson Rothman