PalmOne LifeDrive

The first PDA on the U.S. market with a hard drive, the palmOne LifeDrive ($499 direct) is a device that digital pack rats should love. In fact, the folks at palmOne consider it a mobile manager, one of an entirely new class of handheld products. Its 4GBs of storage should be enough for almost anyone to carry all their critical documents and media. Be forewarned, though. You'll have to recharge the device frequently, and we did encounter some irritating bugs and crashes during our testing, which prevented us from awarding it even higher marks.

Even so it's a cool new device for the gadget fanatic who wants to do a bit of everything on a regular basis, whether play a movie, game, or music, pull up photos, do some tolerable Web surfing, view or work on the occasional Office document, or look up an address.

It's the first device we've seen that can actually handle all these tasks, even if it's not the best at any one in particular. Boxy yet sleek, the LifeDrive looks like something designed by Porsche.

It measures 4.8 by 2.9 by 0.7 inches, weighs 6.8 ounces, and accommodates a huge 320 by 480 screen and a 4GB Hitachi 3K4 Microdrive. It's not actually longer or wider than many other PDAs, but it's deeper.

Holes on the back help vent the drives heat; the LifeDrive gets a little warm, but never uncomfortably so. The LifeDrive is designed to hold all your portable files; we filled ours with 600 MB of MP3s, a full length movie, and a flotilla of review notes, and it was still more than half empty.

(Program files must live in 64MB of RAM, but that's plenty of room for Palm OS software, which is generally pretty compact.) There's a slew of ways to get your files on and off the device, too: You can beam them over Bluetooth, drop them in via SD Card, share them using built-in 802.11b Wi-Fi, sync them from a PC with included software, or just plug the LifeDrive via USB 2.0 into any PC or Mac, where it becomes an external drive without you having to add any additional software.