It’s been too long, but finally it seems PalmOne has gotten their act together and ironed out the issues and staleness with the Palm Pilot product line. With the addition of a 4gig drive, it seems like a great little device to use as a PDA and file-transfer bucket. It’s even Mac-compatible (hey now!). But most interesting is that the PDA is finally Wi-Fi enabled. Hallelujah! It’s infuriating to be a supporter of the platform and have to deal with seeing competitors offer sexier devices which are more feature-rich. The ability to check .Mac, Gmail, AOL, Earthlink and whatever have you without NEEDING a computer is a big step and one that Palm should have taken a while ago.

David Pogue of the NY Times mentions the device’s major shortcoming: “The LifeDrive’s unfortunate case of nacolepsy”

The most serious cause for pause, though, is the LifeDrive’s unfortunate case of narcolepsy. To save power, the hard drive stops spinning between uses. That’s fine. What’s not so fine, however, is that it takes six seconds to spin up again and feed its data into the palmtop’s memory so you can use it.

As a result, your work is frequently interrupted by maddening, six-second visits to the dead zone. Everything is frozen on the screen, no button works and your workflow comes to a crashing halt. There’s no progress bar or ”wait” cursor, either — only a little light at the top of the case tells you: ”Please hold; your work is very important to us.”

These lapses are particularly frequent just after you’ve turned on the LifeDrive for the very first time. Open the calendar: six seconds. Switch to Week view: six seconds. Open the address book: six seconds. Back to the Home screen: six seconds.

According to PalmOne, these lockouts should disappear over time. Once you’ve used a program or feature for the first time, it remains in memory, so that it appears instantaneously thereafter.

That may be true if you do nothing but cycle among the same three smallish programs all day. But on a device as ambitious as this one, nobody’s going to use the same three functions forever. Sooner or later, you’ll open some new program, switch to a new view or open something that’s big enough to push out whatever’s already in memory — and it’s back to Lockjaw Land.

It’s kind of infuriating because it’s one of those things where it seems like engineering brilliance is cut short by a simple usability issue. Jeff Hawking, creator of the original Palm Pilot, once said that the Zen of Palm was that there was no startup time between applications. If you needed a contact manager, you could switch INSTANTLY from the To-Do list, likewise from the Memo Manager. It’s strange how designers and engineers usually forget the basic tenets of what defines their products and makes them so original and necessary to begin with. I’m waiting for the second iteration of the LifeDrive where they hopefully rectify the 6 second drive access delay. You’d think they could use a 2gig Compact Flash card instead of a drive, but who knows, I’m sure I’m not the first person to have thought of such.

Tags: PalmOne | LifeDrive |