junk1@davidbevan.co.uk aszonygya:
:I need to replace my Palm that I lost today and have narrowed it down
:to either the Life Drive or the Palm TX.
:
:...apart from the 4GB storage is there anything that the LifeDrive does
:that the TX doesnt?

Just in case you guys don't get the message about the LifeDrive, a couple of
dyas ago there was a discussion on a private Palm developer list about
LifeDrive vs TX. If I recall correctly, the uniform consensus was that one
of them is a piece of you know what whereas the other is almost perfect.

Please keep in mind that developers worth their salt have dozens of Palms
hanging around and they are very picky when choosing one for personal use.

/PaulN [a former LifeDrive and a current TX owner]

Paul Nevai wrote:
> Just in case you guys don't get the message about the LifeDrive, a couple of
> dyas ago there was a discussion on a private Palm developer list about
> LifeDrive vs TX. If I recall correctly, the uniform consensus was that one
> of them is a piece of you know what whereas the other is almost perfect.
>
> Please keep in mind that developers worth their salt have dozens of Palms
> hanging around and they are very picky when choosing one for personal use.
>
> /PaulN [a former LifeDrive and a current TX owner]

Thanks for the info, what in particular didnt they like about Palm
Drive? Was it unstable or was it just the setup they didnt like?

...if it was stability, then was it just less forgiving of bugs in their
code or do the built in apps run badly?

....are there any features that one has and one doesnt?

Thanks

David Bevan
http://www.davidbevan.co.uk

In article <1151931095.711846.42380@a14g2000cwb.googlegroups.c om>,
junk1@davidbevan.co.uk wrote:

> ...are there any features that one has and one doesnt?

Drive mode in the LifeDrive. Jolly useful for moving
files back and forth between LifeDrive and PC or Mac.

--
Mike Connally
Had to take action 'against spam'. Remove those words to reply.

junk1@davidbevan.co.uk aszonygya:
:
:Paul Nevai wrote:
:> Just in case you guys don't get the message about the LifeDrive, a couple of
:> dyas ago there was a discussion on a private Palm developer list about
:> LifeDrive vs TX. If I recall correctly, the uniform consensus was that one
:> of them is a piece of you know what whereas the other is almost perfect.
:>
:> Please keep in mind that developers worth their salt have dozens of Palms
:> hanging around and they are very picky when choosing one for personal use.
:>
:> /PaulN [a former LifeDrive and a current TX owner]
:
:Thanks for the info, what in particular didnt they like about Palm
rive? Was it unstable or was it just the setup they didnt like?
:
:..if it was stability, then was it just less forgiving of bugs in their
:code or do the built in apps run badly?
:
:...are there any features that one has and one doesnt?

I am sure googling LifeDrive would give you plenty of info.

Slowness, incredibly slow soft-resets, incredibly slow actions occasionally
such as getting thr FIND dialog, frequent crashes in VersaTerm and Blazer,
blank screen, super buggy NVSF and DIA, etc., etc., etc.

I personally loved the size of the LifeDrive but some thought it was too big.

Get the TX. I hated it initially but I loved it more and more by the day [I
had a TC before the TX].

/PaulN

Mike Connally aszonygya:
:In article <1151931095.711846.42380@a14g2000cwb.googlegroups.c om>,
: junk1@davidbevan.co.uk wrote:
:
:> ...are there any features that one has and one doesnt?
:
rive mode in the LifeDrive. Jolly useful for moving
:files back and forth between LifeDrive and PC or Mac.

True. I have a 6G MicroDrive inside a Lexar FireWire reader and I do the same
between my Macs. Much smaller and much easier. Maybe even faster.

/PaulN

> I am sure googling LifeDrive would give you plenty of info.
>
> Slowness, incredibly slow soft-resets, incredibly slow actions occasionally
> such as getting thr FIND dialog, frequent crashes in VersaTerm and Blazer,
> blank screen, super buggy NVSF and DIA, etc., etc., etc.

Thanks, I had done a bit of Googling and yes people do complain about
the soft reset taking 90 seconds and they do complain about VersaMail
crashing (and needing a soft reset)

....but then most people seem to say that the patch 2 that came out has
fixed most of the stability problems.

The LD is £45 more than the TX and these are the pros and cons I can
see so far (please feel free to add)....

LD Pros
More storage
Drive mode

LD Cons
Thicker and heavier than the XT
Less stable (pos just need patch 2?)
Slower to do some things.


Thanks

David Bevan
http://www.davidbevan.co.uk

On 03 Jul 2006, junk1@davidbevan.co.uk wrote:

>> I am sure googling LifeDrive would give you plenty of info.
>>
>> Slowness, incredibly slow soft-resets, incredibly slow actions
>> occasional
> ly
>> such as getting thr FIND dialog, frequent crashes in VersaTerm
>> and Blazer, blank screen, super buggy NVSF and DIA, etc., etc.,
>> etc.
>
> Thanks, I had done a bit of Googling and yes people do complain
> about the soft reset taking 90 seconds and they do complain about
> VersaMail crashing (and needing a soft reset)
>
> ...but then most people seem to say that the patch 2 that came out
> has fixed most of the stability problems.

Yes, there's not yet a major patch for the TX, but every TX owner
knows it's urgently needed.

> The LD is £45 more than the TX and these are the pros and cons I
> can see so far (please feel free to add)....
>
> LD Pros
> More storage

The TX will take a 4 or 8 Gb SD card. I think SD is superior to the
LD's hard drive.

> Drive mode

There's software available (at some cost) to make the TX look like an
external drive to your PC.

> LD Cons
> Thicker and heavier than the XT

True.

> Less stable (pos just need patch 2?)

Stability is a major problem for the TX. It's not a "deal breaker"
in my opinion, but some of that feeling comes from expecting Palm to
issue a major patch sometime real soon ;-)

> Slower to do some things.

Yes, loading from the disk is disconcertingly slow sometimes, but
there are unexplained lags on the TX as well. Sometines it takes
Balzer *forever* to start up.

Big pro for the LD is a microphone. I didn't realize the TX lacked
that until I had it. We've got skype and wifi, but no mic! What
were they thinking?

I don't own a LD, but I went through the same comparison you're doing
once I narrowed the choices to TX or LD. Why not go to a local
retailer and check them out yourself?

Dave

--
D.a.v.i.d T.i.k.t.i.n
t.i.k.t.i.n [at] a.d.v.a.n.c.e.d.r.e.l.a.y [dot] c.o.m

David Tiktin wrote:
> Stability is a major problem for the TX. It's not a "deal breaker"
> in my opinion, but some of that feeling comes from expecting Palm to
> issue a major patch sometime real soon ;-)

Thats odd, most people seem to say that LD is unstable and by
implication the TX is stable?

David Bevan
http://www.davidbevan.co.uk

wrote:

> I need to replace my Palm that I lost today and have narrowed it down
> to either the Life Drive or the Palm TX.
>
> ...apart from the 4GB storage is there anything that the LifeDrive does
> that the TX doesnt?
>
>
> David Bevan
> http://www.davidbevan.co.uk

I have a 4gb Sd card in my TX

David Tiktin aszonygya:
:Yes, loading from the disk is disconcertingly slow sometimes, but
:there are unexplained lags on the TX as well. Sometines it takes
:Balzer *forever* to start up.

Correct, the same with VersaMail. I guess I learned to live with it. It's an
NVFS bug which, I think, Palm pretends that doesn't exist. /PaulN

nospam@nospam.com (Keith) aszonygya:
:I have a 4gb Sd card in my TX

So the implicit conclusion is that it works. Right? I am about to buy one
like that. My current 2Gb SD is fine but it's hard to resist. /PaulN

On Mon, 3 Jul 2006 07:14:17 -0500, junk1@davidbevan.co.uk wrote
(in article <1151928857.180856.252930@v61g2000cwv.googlegroups. com>):

> ...apart from the 4GB storage is there anything that the LifeDrive does
> that the TX doesnt?

I never had a TX, but I had a T5 (which I asssume is pretty similar).

The LD is slow to launch - or load code fragments due to Palm's strange
fixation with non-volatile memory (disk or NVRAM). Once it gets going, it has
a 416 mhz processor though.

Things I dislike about the LD:
1. Slow load times.
2. Slow reset
3. Greater weight

Things I like about the LD:
1. On/off/lock slider switch (the On/Off button on my T5 died twice in a year
- both, I believe, contributing to its failure)
2. Metal case (my plastic T5 case cracked once causing a 3/4" x 5/16" opening
in the case, though I don't recall having dropped it)
3. Lots of storage I use only for infrequently accessed stuff like backups
and photos
4. Microphone is okay, but sound is not great - good in an emergency
5. Feels like a solid piece of hardware

I really am not happy with any palm now - my ideal would be one which had
64MB of real RAM behind a PMMU with 64MB of NVRAM (though 128MB would be
better for both). When the PMMU caught a write access, a dirty flag would be
turned on for that page. At power off (or during idle time), dirty storage
would be back-flushed to the NVRAM.

At power-up, the PMMU would bring pages into real memory from NVRAM in an
on-demand basis.

None of this "over-committed" storage garbage - this is my handheld device,
not a 70s era mainframe. Last thing I need is for my PDA to be thrashing -
whether to disk or NVRAM.

-- Verne

junk1@davidbevan.co.uk wrote:

>>I am sure googling LifeDrive would give you plenty of info.
>>
>>Slowness, incredibly slow soft-resets, incredibly slow actions occasionally
>>such as getting thr FIND dialog, frequent crashes in VersaTerm and Blazer,
>>blank screen, super buggy NVSF and DIA, etc., etc., etc.
>
>
> Thanks, I had done a bit of Googling and yes people do complain about
> the soft reset taking 90 seconds and they do complain about VersaMail
> crashing (and needing a soft reset)
>
> ...but then most people seem to say that the patch 2 that came out has
> fixed most of the stability problems.
>
> The LD is £45 more than the TX and these are the pros and cons I can
> see so far (please feel free to add)....
>
> LD Pros
> More storage
> Drive mode
>
> LD Cons
> Thicker and heavier than the XT
> Less stable (pos just need patch 2?)
> Slower to do some things.
>
>
> Thanks
>
> David Bevan
> http://www.davidbevan.co.uk
>

A lot depends on what you are doing. The LD disk drive is very poor for
GPS navigation. the hard drive will overheat is you keep it spinning all
of the time managing maps and the SD card is considerably faster as well.

Dale
--
_ _ Dale DePriest
/`) _ // http://users.cwnet.com/dalede
o/_/ (_(_X_(` For GPS and GPS/PDAs

> Just in case you guys don't get the message about the LifeDrive, a couple of
> dyas ago there was a discussion on a private Palm developer list about
> LifeDrive vs TX. If I recall correctly, the uniform consensus was that one
> of them is a piece of you know what whereas the other is almost perfect.
>
> Please keep in mind that developers worth their salt have dozens of Palms
> hanging around and they are very picky when choosing one for personal use.
>
.....I was just coming to the conclusion that the TX was the safer more
stable option when I stumbled across several moans about the TX being
unstable!

What is it that makes the Life Drive unstable? Does it have the same OS
as the TX? Or does it do something fundamentally different - is it the
micro drive thats to blame?

David Bevan
http://www.davidbevan.co.uk

On 03 Jul 2006, junk1@davidbevan.co.uk wrote:

> David Tiktin wrote:
>> Stability is a major problem for the TX. It's not a "deal breaker"
>> in my opinion, but some of that feeling comes from expecting Palm to
>> issue a major patch sometime real soon ;-)
>
> Thats odd, most people seem to say that LD is unstable and by
> implication the TX is stable?

I've heard the "LD unstable" part, but that shouldn't imply anything
about the TX. The TX definitely has it's problems. (More satble?
Less stable? If the thing is unstable, it's *unstable*!) Other
postings in this group said the first major patch for the LD solved
many problems. The same is need for the TX. A friend of mine bought a
LD about the same time I bought a TX. He sent his back. I've still
got mine. But honestly, I'm not sure what that means ;-)

Dave

--
D.a.v.i.d T.i.k.t.i.n
t.i.k.t.i.n [at] a.d.v.a.n.c.e.d.r.e.l.a.y [dot] c.o.m

On Mon, 03 Jul 2006, David Tiktin wrote:
> Stability is a major problem for the TX. It's not a "deal breaker"
> in my opinion, but some of that feeling comes from expecting Palm to
> issue a major patch sometime real soon ;-)

I have not had any stability problems at all with my TX, so what needs
fixing. Is it just some old 3rd party apps that cause a problem?

Of course Versamail smtp auth is broken, but I hear it has been like that
for some time, and probably not TX specific. So I am using the old Eudora
for now (it works).

Besides included software and Eudora, the only other apps I have installed
are FileZ, PalmPDF, pssh, Snap, and TCPMP.

efflandt@xnet.com (David Efflandt) aszonygya:
:On Mon, 03 Jul 2006, David Tiktin wrote:
:> Stability is a major problem for the TX. It's not a "deal breaker"
:> in my opinion, but some of that feeling comes from expecting Palm to
:> issue a major patch sometime real soon ;-)
:
:I have not had any stability problems at all with my TX, so what needs
:fixing. Is it just some old 3rd party apps that cause a problem?

VersaMail and Blazer have serious problems but they still work fine most of
the time. They are kind of 3rd party. Developed by 3rd parties and Palm
conveniently fails to test them properly before adding them to the standard
setup. The problems are almost exclusively NVFS related. /PaulN

The TX does have some bugs that pop up.. the main one I see is the
resetting itself sometimes.. It is not a big deal, but when I owned a
Clie, I never had these issues.. Aside from that, it is not a bad
device.. I am waiting for the Patch though, I hope it clears that up
and helps Blazer a little better .. Blazer once in awhile ( for me )
gets a little goofy, but not anything that is too bad. But, I agree, it
seems that palm does not test properly the software that it uses. The
WIFI does seem to work well, and it scans pretty good tp find a
wireless network, and connects quickly .

I was surprised it had these bugs though.. I guess I was spoiled by my
Clie.

Jerry
Paul Nevai wrote:
> efflandt@xnet.com (David Efflandt) aszonygya:
> :On Mon, 03 Jul 2006, David Tiktin wrote:
> :> Stability is a major problem for the TX. It's not a "deal breaker"
> :> in my opinion, but some of that feeling comes from expecting Palm to
> :> issue a major patch sometime real soon ;-)
> :
> :I have not had any stability problems at all with my TX, so what needs
> :fixing. Is it just some old 3rd party apps that cause a problem?
>
> VersaMail and Blazer have serious problems but they still work fine most of
> the time. They are kind of 3rd party. Developed by 3rd parties and Palm
> conveniently fails to test them properly before adding them to the standard
> setup. The problems are almost exclusively NVFS related. /PaulN

junk1@davidbevan.co.uk wrote:
> I need to replace my Palm that I lost today and have narrowed it down
> to either the Life Drive or the Palm TX.
>
> ...apart from the 4GB storage is there anything that the LifeDrive does
> that the TX doesnt?
>
>
> David Bevan
> http://www.davidbevan.co.uk

Thanks for everybodies answers, its disappointing to hear of all these
stability/speed problems. My Tun E has never needed a hard reset and
virtually never needs a soft reset and ran really fast.

I was hoping that the TX or Life Drive would be just like my E, but
faster, more capacity, more connectivity etc, but it sounds like they
both still have problems!

Ive decided to stick with my laptop for at least the short term - true
I cant fit it in my pocket, but then 99% of the time i use my Palm ive
got my laptop with me and am at some kind of desk.

If I dont get on with using the laptop then ill just buy a second hand
tung E off ebay!


Thanks

David Bevan
http://www.davidbevan.co.uk