I got this baby roughly 10 years ago. It’s officially 20 years old now though. I must admit, it wasn’t my favorite Palm PDA. 2 things, the bulk and the Microdrive. When this device was announced I think my daily PDA was a Tungsten T3, it was fine for me.
About the 2 things.
The Bulk
It was super bulky, hardly pocketable, how was this supposed to be a daily part of my Life(drive)? The bulk made it slightly heavier too.
The Microdrive
As all things shall pass, so too do all spinning disc hard drives from the early 2000’s. (And I certainly wasn’t proven wrong on that!)
Here and Now
Fast forward to a few years ago, maybe 2020 or so, I dust off the old Lifedrive and turn it on, then the dreaded click begins. Then I’m not even able to access the icons you usually see when you turn on your Palm. I didn’t dwell on the issue too much, I had plenty of other PDA’s to fuss with at the time.
Super duper fast forward to today, I finally had the courage to do what everybody’s been doing for like the past 15 years, upgrade to a Compact Flash drive.
For my younger readers, Compact Flash drives were some of the earliest forms of flash memory available, they might have been preceded by something called PCMCIA cards, but I can’t remember if they were used as memory cards too.
I think they’re still relevant because of digital cameras, like, the pro kind, I guess they all still use CF cards. Which is kinda cool.
So, I’m not going to bore with the details of the upgrade process. Lots of documentation by more competent mortals than I, but I do have some thoughts…
My Palm Lifedrive CF Upgrade Thoughts
I was afraid I’d run into some glued up parts that would require excessive prying with a spudger. What I got instead were clean parts, clean delineations, which were messed up a bi by my excessive prying with a spudger.
Internals were pretty orderly, everything was easily accessible (not like anything from Apple), so it didn’t take much fussing.
Overall, taking it apart was pretty easy.
On the software side, all the data and directions I needed were available so thanks to the Palm hacker community, that was just as seamless.
Conclusion
It works again! So, that’s great. It’s basically a beefed up, bloated, Palm T5.
Video below…