May 2005 Archives

We've been fooled! Long have I been trying out cleansing solutions that cost an arm and a leg, that guarantee to clean any piecec of technology in a jiffy. The latest one I tried was that two-piece plastic sachet with a solution allegedly composed of 90% Steve Jobb's sweat. However, my friend recommended this really great cleaning solution that REALLY CLEANS my iBook. Now, from a depressing mother-of-pearl color, it is now back to pristine Apple(TM) white! You can buy the Mr. Clean Magic Super Eraser (names vary in international market) from any True Value branch. I just got mine yesterday from Shangri-La mall but I hear the one in Parksquare has a ton of em lying around too. One of these magic erasers will cost you P49.75, which should be cut into strips to make efficient use of space. All I did was cut a half inch strip off and soaked it in water. After squezing the water out, I began to wipe my iBook, charger, Coolpad, mouse, and then my microwave oven. By golly! It really cleans, just like those infomercials we see on TV - except that this time, there are no camea tricks! One swipe does a very good job! Read user testimonials here!! Another reason why I know this stuff works? My mom got hooked on a cleaning spree after I gave her one pack.

When I was beginning my stint as a tech writer, I would often check out Alan's Daily Gadget. Formerly from a group called PDA Avenue where co-editor Howard was very involved with, Alan parted ways to found his new project, The Daily Gadget. Tech, news, and pop culture are the main foci of his site. Recently, he revamped the online forum and made it look more like a tech blog, similar to Engadget and err .. m|ph!

As a top-of-the-line model, the LifeDrive has several wireless options built in: infrared, Bluetooth (1.2--oops, a fact check showed that it's only 1.1), and Wi-Fi (802.11b). For a long time now, Palm users on many a message board have been screaming for a Palm handheld with Wi-Fi. And really, they can’t be blamed, because top-of-the-line PDAs from most other manufacturers had it. They thought it would come in the Tungsten|T3, but it did not. Then the T5 came out, and it did not have Wi-Fi. The SD Wi-Fi card provided little consolation because of the price (P8,000) and the fact that it worked only with a few models. Bluetooth has been present on many palmOne models from the Tungsten|T onwards, so that’s nothing new. It’s still a rather useful feature if you have other Bluetooth-enabled devices such as phones and laptops. You can leave your sync cable behind and HotSync via Bluetooth when on the road, and can connect to the internet with your phone in a pinch. Even IR has its uses in this day and age. I find that it’s the most convenient way of sending over a contact to a cell phone. But Wi-Fi is easily the most anticipated feature of this handheld, because it multiplies the LifeDrive’s usability several times. Whereas large-screen models like the T3 and the T5 were useful for working on office documents—even large spreadsheets—they were limited to just working on documents. Wi-Fi adds a kind of immediacy to the work you do with the LifeDrive, like pulling down some data from the Web, reading and responding to an urgent email, sending out updated versions of Word or Excel files. If need be, you can also connect to your office server via VPN, though I never had a chance to try it as our office network wasn’t set up for it. But I had not trouble accessing other sites, whether through open hotspots (at home) or public, commercial ones (I tried it out on Airborne Access, which gives every LifeDrive buyer a two-month free subscription). Overall, I still think that a PDA screen makes for cramped browsing, and it’s not something that I would do for extended periods. But definitely, Wi-Fi makes the LifeDrive much more useful, and there are many occasions when I would rather much bring a LifeDrive and a wireless keyboard instead of my laptop and still get as much work done. Conclusion: The LifeDrive has some rough edges, but that’s pretty much expected for a first product in a new class of handhelds. It’s the most full-featured handheld in the market right now, so the rather steep price is justified. I’d recommend it to early adopters who are willing to put up with a few shortcomings, and to those who’ve sat out the upgrade cycle for the last couple of years.

3.85 gig of hard drive space is way too much for work files. And all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy anyway. The LifeDrive is meant to keep tons of multi-media files: photos, music, videos. An iPod this ain’t, but it can make a serviceable replacement for an iPod shuffle or iPod mini. Pocket Tunes has replaced Real Player as the default MP3 player, and it looks and works better. It’s skinnable, and the D-pad works for adjusting volume and moving to the next or previous track. If you only have MP3s (and doesn’t nearly everyone?), you’ll be fine with Pocket Tunes. But if you have other formats, like Ogg Vorbis, WMA, or AAC, you’ll have to get other programs. AeroPlayer, and old favorite of mine, can handle Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and AAC files (the player is free if you only have Ogg Vorbis files). Upgrading to the Deluxe version of Pocket Tunes will give you WMA functionality as well as the ability to stream internet radio on the LifeDrive. The Core Media Player (TCMP), a free, open source project, will also let you play Ogg, MP3, and AAC files, as well as video. The interface could use a lot of improvement (no playlists, only play and pause), but it’s free so it’s hard to complain. For this test I copied over nearly 800MB of MP3 and AAC files, and all three players handled the files well. Of the three, Pocket Tunes seemed to be using some sort of caching function and was accessing the hard drive much less frequently compared to the other two, and will probably give the longest playing time. In a very informal test, I ran TCMP for an hour and that brought battery life down to 50%. I then switched to Pocket Tunes, and played for another two hours, which brought battery capacity down to 34%. On the LifeDrive, battery life really varies depending on how efficiently programs use the hard drive. Though I never ran the battery down playing only music, I’d bet that the LifeDrive will run for at least 6 hours using Pocket Tunes. I also dumped 150MB worth of photos from my trip to Lucban. Each photo was 1600 by 1200 pixels in dimension, and about 1.5MB in size. Playing them back as a slide show on the LifeDrive was a breeze as the LifeDrive scaled them down to the 320 by 480 screen. My only quibble is that it cropped the photos since the screen didn’t correspond to the 3 x 4 orientation of most of the pictures. 3.85 gigs isn’t that much space for holding movies, but it can hold at least a couple and leave you enough space for music, photos, and work files. I’m not a true believer in portable video (yet), mainly because the time and effort it takes to either rip or hunt down videos on the Web is far from being a mainstream activity. It just ain’t as effortless and as quick as ripping songs from a CD. But for those who have either the patience or the links to online videos, you’ll be disappointed to discover that the Media player is rather limited. After loading a bunch of video files into the LifeDrive, it only recognized the video clips form my camera (in .avi format) and the LifeDrive flash presentation (in .asf format). The Quicktime trailers and ads and DivX/Xvid files weren’t recognized. Good thing there was TCMP to the rescue. It recognized and played back (some) of the .mov files and all the DivX/Xvid files. Smoothly. I didn’t have to resize the videos or run them through some kind of converter. I just copied them over in Drive Mode and then opened them in TCMP. Then came a rather unpleasant surprise. When I looped an Alias episode and let it play with brightness set on 50%, the LifeDrive gave out a low-batt warning after 1-1/2 hours, and then quit after another six minutes. That’s not even enough to finish watching a movie. The LifeDrive’s battery capacity is actually decent—1660 mAh, according to one web source. But it seems that TCMP doesn’t do any caching, and was almost constantly accessing the hard drive. The limited-function media player and the short battery life when using other video players make the LifeDrive a so-so video player only. Tomorrow: Bluetooth? Check. Wi-Fi? Check.

Although palmOne is adamant about not calling this a PDA (it’s a Mobile Manager, for God’s sake ;-)), it’s only logical to use their previous high-end PDAs—the Tungsten|T3 and T5—as the starting point for looking at the LifeDrive’s specs. Before proceeding to describe what’s new, let’s list down what’s not new. The processor is the same as the one on the T5: a 416-megahertz Intel Xscale processor. The screen is the same as that of the T3 and the T5, as far as I can tell. Good, but nothing great. The stock apps are all there, with the addition of a new music player (Pocket Tunes), a Wi-Fi connection manager, and the new Camera Companion app for transferring photos from an SD card to the LifeDrive. The memory, at 64MB, is the same non-volatile kind found in the T5 and Treo 650. The hard drive—an IBM MicroDrive—is the biggest thing about the LifeDrive, of course. The drive has a capacity of 4 gigabytes, but “only

I’m glad to see that the LifeDrive is smaller than I imagined it to be. The initial rumors on the Web said that it was twice as thick as the Tungsten|T5. Well, if you want to be technical about it, it’s about 1-1/4 times as thick as the T5 (15 mm vs 19 mm). It’s Palm’s biggest handheld so far, but its not so big that you can’t pocket it. Granted, it’ll be a tight fit in your shirt pocket, but who carries PDAs around in his shirt pocket anyway? It will slip easily into your pants pocket, although you might get funny looks of the “Is that a rocket in your pocket…