Lifedrive Mutterings

While others have pointed this out, it didn't really occur to me until now that I haven't posted all year. That's a shame, because I ran into some sh*t in the IT realm that could really use some discussing. I'll try and do better with that.

Over the last couple of days, I took advantage of the quiet to spend a little bit of time with my Palm Lifedrive. I bought this thing about 6 or 7 years ago, back when I was using a lot of Palm devices (my favorite was the Palm Tungsten E). The funny thing is, the reason I started toying with it again was all this stuff we're seeing now about these new touchscreen media devices and/or iPad "killers" that are coming out. Especially the ones with the smaller 7" screens made to fit in your jacket pocket. It occurred to me that although dated and a bit clunky looking compared to the new devices coming out, my Lifedrive does nearly everything that these new devices do. It doesn't do any of it particularly well, but it does them.

I can use Wifi, tether with Bluetooth to my phone, and install lots of different apps. If there's a Palm application marketplace though, I definitely don't get it on my Lifedrive. I'm stuck trolling all the old websites that many Palm users are familiar with and I won't really get into here.

Anyway, it was good for a little bit of nostalgia. To me, the Lifedrive is basically an Apple iPod Touch, except bigger and uglier. It always seemed to me that the Lifedrive was a solution looking for a problem, and it never really caught any traction. However, now that everyone in the world is hooked on their Kindles, touchscreen phones, iPads, etc., there is a huge market for these gadgety toys now and Palm was simply too early to the party.

The end result of this tinkering though is that I very likely will dedicate it to eBook reading using Mobipocket, and portable movie watching using an old version of TCPMP (which, at the time, was sorta like VLC for the handheld). As old as my Lifedrive is, it's still VASTLY superior to reading books on my Blackberry Bold 9700 (using Mobipocket, same program).

So, does anyone out there have a Lifedrive? If so, what do YOU use it for?