Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager
By Tony Smith
Published Wednesday 20th July 2005 14:14 GMT

So what exactly is a Mobile Manager? To Palm, it's an entirely new category of portable device, but it's hard to conclude that it's anything more than a PDA with more storage. Palm needs to create a new device type, of course.

Despite more than half a decade of Palm trying to convince consumers that a PDA is more than an electronic organiser, that's still how most people view them. And if you're going to put a hard drive into a PDA, you may as well try and make it sound like something new, something special. But the fact remains: the LifeDrive is a Tungsten T5 with a greater, 4GB storage capacity.

That's not to say there aren't improvements - gone, for example, is the ropey RealOne MP3 player, replaced by the Ogg-enabled, iTunes-styled Pocket Tunes from NormSoft - but beyond the quantity of data you can hold on the thing, there's little in the way of new functionality on the device itself.

Voice recording makes a come-back. Added to the original Tungsten, it was subsequently dropped, but with almost every other media player and PDA allowing their users to record spoken memos, Palm obviously decided it was prudent to bring the facility back.

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