New PalmOne Offerings Fall Short of Promise

Even though it was tailor-made to slip into a shirt or pants pocket, the handheld organizer is having a hard time fitting in these days. Should it be the smallest possible container for your calendar, address book, to-do list and notes? Should it fuse with your phone? What about a music player?

Faced with so many choices, PalmOne Inc., the company that popularized the entire category a decade ago with its Pilots and PalmPilots, has been stuck in neutral. Until 2 1/2 weeks ago, it had not introduced a substantially new model since the Treo 600 smartphone's debut in fall 2003. Its basic system software has barely budged since Palm OS 5 shipped in late 2002 -- even Windows XP has seen more significant updates in that time.

Now this company (which will soon rename itself back to just "Palm") is taking two steps forward. One, its new LifeDrive, tries to combine the virtues of traditional organizers and newer portable multimedia players. The other, its Tungsten E2, adds some higher-end features to PalmOne's popular Tungsten E.

Neither model seems likely to break the market for handhelds wide open again. But while the LifeDrive shows more ambition, the Tungsten E2 actually delivers on its humbler, less exciting goals.

Storage, wireless capability and multimedia support are supposed to justify the LifeDrive's $499 price -- more than the combined price of an iPod Mini and a WiFi-enabled, Windows Mobile-based handheld. But while some individual functions work well here, they're not knitted into an effective whole.

For starters, at roughly 4 3/4 inches long by 2 7/8 inches wide by 3/4 inches thick, the LifeDrive fits poorly or not at all in many pockets -- you can't carry this anywhere, defeating the point of having a handheld organizer.

Those bulky contours are filled by an internal hard drive as well as the flash memory traditionally used by Palm handhelds. But despite a cost and size exceeding that of a high-end iPod, the LifeDrive holds less than four gigabytes of data.

Better news comes on the communications front: For the first time since the two-year-old Tungsten C, PalmOne remembered to build WiFi into a handheld. The test LifeDrive connected to both a secured home network and a coffee shop's free access -- but its software did nothing to ease the job of entering a lengthy WiFi encryption key, and it sometimes had trouble staying on these networks.

The included Web and e-mail software does a fine job of displaying Web and e-mail content on a screen far smaller than any computer's. A button on the LifeDrive's flank rotates the screen from a tall portrait orientation to a wide, landscape orientation that should work better with most Web pages.

The Palm operating system shows its age when browsing the Web, though. You can't switch to another program while the browser downloads things -- doing that shuts down the entire browser, so you must sit and watch things download, just like in 1995.

The LifeDrive also includes Bluetooth wireless to transfer data to and from the relatively few computers, cell phones and handhelds that support this technology.

Like other Palm models, the LifeDrive tracks your appointments, addresses, to-do list and notes, keeping them in sync with either the included Palm Desktop software or Microsoft Outlook; bundled third-party software reads and edits Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with better fidelity than the programs Microsoft includes in its own Windows Mobile software.