Out of retirement, my LifeDrive has come to allow me to be mobile. After turning my Blackberry in with my last employer about 6 weeks ago, I realized that I have a habit. Seriously, I still think I hear buzzing and want to check my Blackberry. It’s not the instance access that I get with a Blackberry but when there’s WiFi, I can get online. I don’t do so as much but I can also connect to my phone with Bluetooth using it as a modem.

Palm released the LifeDrive as a mobile manager – whatever that means – at the end of 2005. I think they called it a mobile manager to get away from calling it a PDA. The device would be continued in January 2007 undoubtedly due to competition from smartphones. It had promise though. I actually got mine some time in 2006 even though I had a Treo from work. I had my share of problems with it. The main one being that many of the programs that were available for previous Palm handhelds were not supported by the LifeDrive. There was truly no way to know this except that the device would crash. When this occurred the device would get stuck in an infinite loop of resets that wouldn’t stop until the battery ran down. Some times a soft reset would fix the program but many times a hard reset was needed, erasing all the data in the flash memory.

I had the device stable for quite some time and I had started using it to listen to podcasts. I even recorded some audio with it that I had planned to use in a video I was making about paid protesters in DC (still not complete). One day I was listening to a podcast on the Metro and the device crashed. It was unrecoverable. Because I had not sync’ed in a while I lost the audio I recorded. I have since learned that I could have saved the audio directly to the device’s hard drive instead of to the flash memory. At the time though, I was furious. I spent a lot of time trying to fix the finicky device to no avail. It could still be used to record audio and create Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents, etc., but I couldn’t get the additional programs I originally had on it to work. So the LifeDrive went into retirement … until that is I had no choices but to spend money (I’m cheap … errr, frugal) or to use what I had.

This go-round the device seems to be stable (knock on wood). I have not installed all the programs that I had on it originally though. Still missing are two different eBook applications and NoviiRemote which I used as a remote for my TV and other electronics. I really enjoy using it with Twitter especially with the Bluetooth keyboard.

I still plan on getting an iPhone next month but I may still use the LifeDrive from time to time.

It’s funny how in technology a 3 year old device is considered old school. I have some other old devices I might talk about soon – that or I’ll open up a museum.

Update: After posting this I found this guy who says that his LifeDrive has been a faithful companion for the past 3 years and even though he’s lusting after the new iPhone that he will continue to use his LifeDrive.  He must really love it.  I need to find out how he swapped his 4GB hard drive for a 16GB compact flash card.  That would be lovely.

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