A male model shows off LifeDrive, the first of palmOne’s new Mobile Manager line, in Toronto’s subway.

Call it a PDA on steroids.

And PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) leader palmOne is banking it will help add some muscle to its dipping sales.

palmOne took the first step in a major directional foray today, launching a brand-new PDA line it calls Mobile Manager with a mega-featured device called the LifeDrive.

The LifeDrive merges business productivity tools and entertainment applications and features a four gigabyte hard drive, a large 320×480-pixel, high-resolution colour screen, a 416 megahertz processor and wireless access through built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies.

It is palmOne’s first product with hard-drive storage. The company said the Hitachi-made one-inch microdrive is smaller than a matchbook and transfers data 30-per-cent faster than previous-generation models.

With the addition of the new microdrive, palmOne said the device can carry 1,200 office documents, 6,000

e-mails, 1,000 photos, 300 songs, 2.5 hours of video, 50 voicemails, 10,000 contacts and 10,000 appointments.

“Your personal and professional lives are becoming ambiguous,” said Michael Moskowitz, president of palmOne Canada, in an interview. “It crosses that boundary daily –whether it’s your kid’s photos or your personal videos or your business documents, it’s all intertwined.

“That’s a big part of what’s driving this new category.”

Battery life is dependent on the application, but the device can play two to three DVD movies on a charge, said Moskowitz. The suggested retail for the LifeDrive is $699.

PalmOne, which already has Zire and Tungsten lines of PDAs for consumers and professionals, respectively, as well as its Treo smart phone, is clearly looking to invigorate sales with the new line.

According to a recent analyst report by Gartner Inc., PalmOne suffered a 26-per-cent drop in PDA shipments worldwide, compared to the first quarter of 2004, in the first three months of this year.

© The Vancouver Province 2005