New PalmOne Handheld Could Rival IPod

Wednesday May 18, 6:25 pm ET

By Greg Sandoval, AP Technology Writer

PalmOne`s New Handheld With Built-In Hard Drive Could Rival IPod; Will Retail for $499

SAN FRANCISCO -- PalmOne Inc.`s new handheld with a built-in hard drive makes it possible to jam more rich content than ever into your pocket.

The Milpitas, Calif.-based company, a pioneer of electronic organizers, hailed the ``LifeDrive`` as a new breed of personal digital assistant, the first to feature a hard drive.

The device, which will retail for $499, has 4 gigabytes of storage, a large color screen (320-pixel-by-480-pixel) and is roughly the same width and length as most PDAs.

By offering to manage a person`s entire MP3 music collection, as well as movies, games, photos and large quantities of documents, the LifeDrive is the latest challenger to iPod digital music player from Apple Computer Inc.

LifeDrive also can connect to the Web wirelessly via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth technology and offers support for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files.