palmOne – Products – LifeDrive Mobile Manager

What do you guys think of this?

It doesn’t work with iTunes so it won’t kill the iPod. You can store office documents on the HDD, but it doesn’t have anything like M$ Office, so it probably won’t work as well as the (god forbid) PocketPC handhelds… It doesn’t have a phone function so it’s not as useful as the Treo… I doubt the picture viewer can handle different types of RAW files so it won’t work as a picture dump like the Epson P-2000. It also lacks a CF card slot, most prosumer or D-SLR’s still use CF cards.

Good for students? Well, not sure about all schools, but at Carnegie Mellon or MIT all students had AFS access so there was really no need to carry any data around, I’m sure most schools provide students with at least some kindda web storage so they can put up their personal webpages… and there is always Gmail for cheap free mass storage…

I guess it’s sorta a jack-of-all-trade attempt for Palm, I can’t say it isn’t a good idea… Everything kindda make sense, but I still would prefer an iPod, mainly because of iTunes (and Apple Lossless), and a Treo 650. It’s just because I don’t think I would carry an extra PDA with me at all times, but if it’s my cellphone I would. And a mini keyboard is far better than Graffiti, I’ve been a Palm user for 5 years so I know my Graffiti (and Graffiti shortcuts!!) pretty darn well, but I can basically do everything with the 5-way navigator and the keyboard on my Treo 650 without ever removing the stylus.

I guess if I were in the market for a PDA it might appeal to me, for $100 more than the T5 I get a 4GB HDD, more included apps (still no VPN app included!!), WiFi and Bluetooth built-in so I can use the expansion slot for something else.