tech ronin

Treo and Lifedrive: Partners in Crime?

Being a person who (a) wants the maximum cool tool support and (b) believes in the value of an intermediate device between a small handheld and a notebook, once I purchased my Treo 650 a couple weeks ago, my mind wandered right back over to the Lifedrive.

The Lifedrive's popularity in geek circles is on the rise. Although impressive and cool immediately, many of us were disappointed with reports of (1) slow application start-up times, (2) application incompatibility like Fitaly, (3) instability, (4) really time-consuming and data losing resets and (5) poor battery life. Well, most of that's handled -- already.

There's been a Lifedrive update. Their's a new caching program (SharkCache) to elimate most load time issues and besides people seem to quickly adjust their expections to the slight delays.

There's now a hack to run Fitaly using SkinDIA. More apps have been updated. There's a way to quickly reset only the RAM instead of the whole hard drive.

So, the question is, just because I have a Treo 650, does that mean I can't have this other amazing device called a Lifedrive? Let's set aside fiscal sanity for a moment.

It seems logical to me that these two Palm's could be made to complement each other's talents. Via Bluetooth, couldn't I use the Wi-fi in the Lifedrive on my Treo? Could I download quicker with that Wi-fi? And couldn't I use the ubiquitous Edge on my Cingular Treo to augment what's available to my Lifedrive?

If you like the lifedrive, surely a Treo 650 would be the ideal cell phone compared to getting some other phone and then carrying one of those little portable keyboards around? (Of course, this assumes you can afford the 650 and that you enjoy thumb typing.)

Treo 650:
Cell Phone
Ubiquitous Net connection via Edge
Great little Qwerty keyboard
Camera

Lifedrive:
Wi-fi
4 gig hard drive
Bigger horizontal screen

If I got a Lifedrive, I can see using it like this:

Master PDA: because it has 4 gigs, I would put more on it. More reference material. More notes. More podcasts and my favorite 60 songs of the moment. More photos - creating some little photo albums.

The companion for my camera. This would be the fastest way to offload pix from my camera.

Browser of choice. At home over wi-fi, I wouldn't have to use my Powerbook to read. I could use the less obtrusive, less heavy, pocketable Lifedrive. Reading horizontally, especially with RSS feeds which are more text-heavy and friendly to a smaller device.

Book Replacement. Using it horizontally, this could be a very comfortable way to read. Even better than my Zire. The bigger screen compared to my Treo would be nice.

I'm sure there are other uses as well. If it is a hassle to synch both of these devices to my calendar, then maybe this is not as good an idea as I thought. But, if that's no problem, I'm off. I'll bring the Lifedrive whenever possible when I go out and when not will just operate with the Treo 650. Compared to schlepping my 15" Powerbook, the Lifedrive seems like no trouble at all.

I'll probably wait a while on all this because I am still kneedeep in the Treo learning curve and I do live in a world of fiscal constraints no matter how hard I try to imagine otherwise.

Technorati Tags: cellphone, handhelds, lifedrive, mobilephone, mobility, Palm, PDA, smartphone, treo, treo650, Wi-fi, wireless

Treo 650: User Update

This Treo rocks. I totally understand the *I love my Treo* people. I'm one of them. It's gorgeous and great. I was worried about the size when shopping for a cell phone. But, now that I have this amazingly easy to use always connected pocket computer cell phone, the size seems quite small and manageable.

I have two new favorite applications besides the included Blazer browser running on Cingular's Edge network. They're going to make my time away from the computer a lot more fun and probably a little more productive too.

Quick News 1.1. Hand/RSS seems to have morphed into Quick News. Stand Alone, Inc. directed me to Quick News and said my registration code for Hand/RSS would also work on it. This is cool because Quick News is adding features rapidly and is easier to use. It seems bound for full RSS client-hood. I put in about 15 of my favorite feeds for now.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the latest version supports podcasts directly. That's nice but podcasts are big and downloading them live isn't very manageable. This is more of an overnight thing which will be done automatically if you keep your phone powered up and connected while you sleep. I used to read news feeds on my Zire 72 but I couldn't surf the links like I can with my Treo. You can flag, beam, copy or email a post or copy the link. This is good stuff.

iPedia. This little wireless encyclopedia from ArsLexis gives me live access to Wikipedia's 550,000 articles. It sucks them down to my 320x320 screen. It is optimized for the Treo 650 (they have a version for PocketPC also). The search feature lets you gradually narrow down from a big category to a smaller one by adding further criteria. Great! A must have for $29.95.

Email. I haven't yet decided what to do for email as I've got a capable email client for starters with Versamail 3 and am checking out two others that have received kudos: SnapperMail and ChatterMail. I'll be using Versamail in the meantime. More on that soon.

Usability. This is an elegant device. From what I read, there are more cutting edge smartphones out there, but for sheer ease and elegance, the Treo 650 can't be beat. It's a pleasure to use. I realize now that learning curve is a huge deal -- being able to build on my Palm experience is a major plus. Palm users take note. When I got my Sony Ericsson P800 two years ago, I was in shock how hard it was to get the value that was there out of it. I couldn't relate. I never was able to spend the time getting to where I really felt comfortable and was using more than 10% of the functionality. Now I have a chance to use 70% or so. That's a big difference. Part of it is that the Palm UI is way superior to what the P800 has and part is that I'm used to Palm. I can't tell how much is one and how much is the other.

I already had some good third party apps on my Zire 72 and was able to install and use them on my Treo without having to buy them again:

• Memoleaf. A souped up Memos replacement with powerful search functions. $7.95.
• eReader Pro - the best/most dominant ebook reader available. Includes dictionary and other goodies. $14.95.
• HanDBase. A full database development environment for the Palm and PocketPC. Synchs to FileMaker databases. $24.99.
• PhoneMagic. Addressbook replacement. $19.95.
• Shadow Plan. Outliner/To Do List.
• Slap. Lets you type into it and then slap it into email, memo, to do, contacts or calendar. Great capture device.
• TextPlus. Predictive text app with it's own user modifiable vocabulary. $19.95.
• TealPaint. Neat little color paint app. $17.95.
• ZLauncher. A replacement for the basic launcher. $17.95.
• BackupMan. Does complete backup to your SD card automatically at an appointed time every day. $10.

Combining a cell phone with a Palm handheld makes a whole lot of sense. It adds all sorts of value to the PDA and the PDA adds back value to the phone. When I first fell in love with my Palm V, I thought then that what I really wanted was a cell phone built in too. Now I have it!

Technorati Tags: cellphone, Cingular, Edge, mobilephone, Palm, PDA, QuickNews, treo, treo650