It's a PDA! It's a laptop! It's LifeDrive!(Personal digital assistants)(Product/Service Evaluation)

The Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager is a personal digital assistant on steroids, and the company calls it the first of a new class of product. Besides the usual PDA talents--appointments, address book, to-do lists, and e-mail--the Palm OS-based LifeDrive has a 3.7-gigabyte hard drive, with music and photo software to take advantage of all that storage.

The LifeDrive, $500, has all the features of other Palm PDAs, which cost about $100 to $400. All can open and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files without conversion, and all have the same user interface. Here's how the LifeDrive differs from most PDAs:

THE PROS

File handling. Most PDAs let you view photos, listen to MP3s, and manage files. The LifeDrive's hard drive, however, lets you store music and picture files on the PDA itself, instead of an external memory card. You can access the LifeDrive from a Windows or Mac computer, which recognizes the PDA as a USB-connected external hard drive.You can also move pictures from your camera's MultiMedia/SD memory card to the LifeDrive. We copied photos from a full 512-megabyte card to the LifeDrive in less than five minutes. And for all this hard-drive activity, battery life is comparable to that of other Palms.

Connections. Like many new PDAs, the LifeDrive has a Web browser, an email program, and WiFi capability for Internet access. It also has Bluetooth, which can be used to print to similarly enabled printers or access the Internet (should a WiFi hot spot be unavailable) via GSM-based cell phones using Cingular or T-Mobile service.

Size. The LifeDrive is only slightly larger and heavier than a conventional PDA, and its display is a bit bigger, at ...