Which PDA To Buy?Which PDA To Buy?

When our writer needed a new PDA, he asked for help from blog readers. Here's what they said.

David DeJean, Contributor

May 9, 2006

5 Min Read
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I pondered all this very good advice and looked for good deals. Staples, the big office-supply chain, had a sale on Palms, and the Palm TX seemed to have everything I was looking for, so I took my wife into the store and we stood in front of the display. I pointed to the TX.

"What about that one?" She pointed to the Palm LifeDrive, which, like the TX does WiFi and MP3 and has an SD card slot and a rotatable screen, and, unlike the TX, has a built-in 4GB hard drive.

"Yeah," I said, "I like it a lot, but it's so expensive, and with that hard drive battery life has got to be awful, and . . ."

"If you like it buy it," she said.

So I did.

Nobody had commented on the LifeDrive, and I suspect price is the reason it hasn't gotten more attention. When it was introduced last year the LifeDrive was priced at a heart-stopping $499. It has recently dropped it to the $399 range on the street, about $100 more than the TX.

I justified my purchase by saying I couldn't buy 4GB worth of SD cards for $100 (not actually true these days if you're a careful shopper, but who wants to spend all day swapping cards?)

With a couple of weeks experience under my belt, I think I did the right thing.

I do use the WiFi. It's not as useful as I had hoped it might be. I had had WAN service with a modem add-on for my Palm Vx, and anywhere availability for your e-mail is better than hunting down a WiFi hotspot. That is the key to the BlackBerry's success, I am sure. And even though the WiFi works well enough, and the LifeDrive has a terrific screen, the Web is still designed for SuperVGA. A PDA screen is just too small a window to look at the Web through.

Palm's VersaMail application is usable, though I've had trouble setting it up to work with Gmail. Using Web-based mail services, however has been problematic. More than once I've labored with the stylus and the new, unfamiliar version of Graffiti on the LifeDrive to create a couple of paragraphs of reply in Yahoo Mail and clicked send only to lose the message somewhere in the process of reconnecting to the wireless router. I'm left with "Message Not Sent" and no way to get my laboriously created text back. I've got to remember to compose in Memo and copy to Mail.

What I really use the LifeDrive for is music. I second the complaints about using a PDA as a media player. It is awkward to have to get your stylus out to select tunes. And there are other interface problems with Pocket Tunes as well — there's no single-click "Play Album" command, for instance. But I really like having music in my pocket.

I did make a discovery that has made the LifeDrive even more of a music machine. I bought a Brando WorkShop Palm Music Dock. It's an overgrown cradle that does all the usual Palm cradle things -- charges, hotsyncs, data transfers -- plus it includes a couple tiny speakers that produce surprisingly good sound. For $35 it comes with a charger and USB connector cable. It comes from Hong Kong, by the way, and frankly I wondered how well that would work, but it arrived on my doorstep in a week. The Music Dock works not only with the LifeDrive, but with the Palm TE 2, T5, and TX. If you've got one of those, get one of these.

As I suspected, the battery life of the LifeDrive isn't great. When you turn WiFi on you can almost hear it sucking the batteries down, and anything that leaves the screen on for long periods, like reading an ebook, is a battery killer. But the audio player seems to do pretty well -- roughly equivalent to my limited experience with iPods. My Palm Vx went on the charger once a month. My LifeDrive lives on the charger. But that seems to be OK.

A couple of the commenters mentioned the changes in Graffiti, and I'll have to say, they suck. I like some things about the change, like the elimination of the shift stroke, but I'm having trouble getting used to two-stroke characters like "i" and "t" and especially the "k." I read on the Palm Infocenter blog that there's a way to replace Graffiti 2 with the original Graffiti. If I try that I'll let you know how it goes.

Finally, I'd second three points that one of the commenters, Jim Johnson, made:

  • Be sure to get a hard case, mine gets dropped a lot out of my pocket and the case has done a terrific job protecting my Palm.

    Check out the Brighthand Forums available from the Palm website. You will get a lot of insight on Battery life and other important information. Wait for any new Palm to be refined and QC issues dealt with by not purchasing one until its been available for a few months.

I was tempted by the LifeDrive last year. I didn't hear of major problems with them then, but the product I bought has been solid. If there were any bugs they've been shaken out -- along with some of the original high price.

My thanks to everybody who shared their experiences and advice.

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