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.