Rumored Palm LifeDrive Looks Interesting

Hey. I just saw this unannounced Palm handheld on Engadget yesterday (with additional pix). They found it on Amazon. Major feature besides the cool design is that it sports a 4 gig drive. Also a 416 mhz Xscale processor, WiFi and Bluetooth. Understated elegance. Wonder what it would be like to have a Palm with a 4 gig hard drive. Amazon is listing it for a May 18 launch.

In some ways a Palm with a hard drive makes perfect sense. It gives you a lot of room for all those photos you are taking. And a large screen (320 x 480) to view them on unlike the much smaller iPod photo screen. And the cool thing is that this thing almost certainly has a slot somewhere (hope and pray for that one). If so, it will work great for exchanging photos and music. It would be cool if it has a standard high-speed USB 2.0 port that could connect to other devices too (I'm not expecting it, but it sure would make sense.).

I can't see a camera on it, but maybe Palm figures you've got that in your phone already (which would be a reasonable assumption for the type of customer who would buy this).

Lately, a lot of people have been going back to analog for the note taking function with Moleskines and 3x5 cards (probably helped along by the removal of graffiti 1 by the way), but some are still using their dedicated handhelds as a mobile reference store. Mike Rohde was just saying yesterday that he uses his Palm as mostly a read only device these days. A way to carry around a library of books, RSS feeds and other reference materials and maybe a few songs.

Just when the non-cell Palm handheld was losing life, this new 4-gig device shows up in the nick of time. I look forward to trying it out.

Technorati Tags: handheld, mobility, Palm, personal technology