The LifeDrive is PalmOne's attempt to take the PDA where no PDA has gone before, and turn what is in essence a subset of the desktop PC into a full copy of it, for carrying around in your pocket. It is the first in a new category of PDA that the company is calling 'mobile manager.'

If that sounds far-fetched, check the size of your 'My Documents' folder. If you are storing less than 3.8GB of data, then you can carry the lot on a LifeDrive, because there is a hard drive inside it with 3.85GB of available space.

"How do you get all that data onto the LifeDrive?", you may ask. The answer is to use a software component PalmOne bundles with the hardware, along with its usual Palm Desktop, that can synchronise the LifeDrive's hard drive with folders on your computer. When you'd rather use some of that memory as if it were a giant USB key drive, you can make a USB connection with a computer, pop into Drive Mode and copy files to and from the device.

With both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi built-in, and a good range of wireless applications pre-installed including the Blazer Web browser, VersaMail for e-mail, an SMS manager and Dialer, you can also use the LifeDrive as a mobile communications tool. There's an SD Card slot in the top of the casing and an application which can drop picture files from it onto the internal memory, so you can use the LifeDrive while out and about as a repository for images from your digital camera, viewing them on the 320 x 480 pixel screen. Any music you may have on board can be played through PocketTunes, which is also pre-installed.

It's not all fun though. Professionals who need to work on documents throughout the day may find the pre-installed copy of Documents To Go useful for reading, editing and creating native Word and Excel files. The 416MHz Intel XScale processor did not, incidentally, seem fazed by any testing of the above and other features.

You might expect that a PDA with a 4GB hard drive inside it is going to be larger than average. The LifeDrive is ever so slightly bigger than the norm and ever so slightly heavier too, but its 193g of weight and 121 x 73 x 19mm dimensions are not by any means excessive.

While we're on the subject of physical characteristics, the fully silver casing is easy on the eye, while the chunky application shortcut buttons are a doddle to find and use. PalmOne scores a particular hit with this user for the hardware button on the left edge of the casing that flicks the screen between landscape and portrait modes. Another interface highlight is the Hold feature on the on/off switch which means you can avoid accidentally turning the machine on when it is being carried.

This matters because the one failing of the LifeDrive is that its battery is not removable. When we tested it by looping MP3 music played from an SD card, a challenge we felt appropriate to a device of this scope, we got just two hours and 38 minutes of music.

It's not quite perfection. The battery life, rather than the occasional waits while the hard drive is accessed, turned out to be our main gripe with the LifeDrive. But if this kind of device really does mark the start of a whole new category of PDA from PalmOne, it looks like we are in for an interesting time over the coming months.