PalmOne Confirms New Type Of Mobile Device In Works

"Mobile managers are designed for customers who are eager to take full advantage of the trend toward 'digital everything' -- from documents and e-mail to music, images and video, as standalone files or in organized folders," the company said in a statement released Monday morning.

The other two categories of mobile devices, as defined by palmOne, are handhelds and smartphones.

Rumors have been swirling on the Internet for the last several months that the LifeDrive would include a built-in hard drive and wireless support, notions supported by the brief posting of the device on Amazon.com. The price on Amazon.com for the initial LifeDrive device was $499 and availability was set for May 18.

While palmOne provided no such details in its announcement Monday, its vague statement still appeared to confirm that the device will be set up to carry a lot of information.

"In studying customer trends, we found that some people want to carry dozens of documents and hundreds of songs while others want to carry a thousand-plus photos and enjoy videos," Page Murray, palmOne's vice president of marketing, said in a statement. "Organization functions were highly valued by nearly all our customers, but some wanted much more business and personal file-management capabilities. We listened and will deliver a new category of mobile-computing product that will let customers fuse their own mix of personal and business content in ways never before possible in either handheld computers or smartphones."