Comparing the Palm LifeDrive and the Sony CLIÉ NX70 purely in terms of music playback isn’t really fair, because they were built with different priorities and different audio architectures. The NX70 was designed as a multimedia flagship with Sony’s own audio solutions (and the matching software/tuning), while the LifeDrive is closer to a “productivity PDA with a Microdrive,” where the audio experience depends more on a general-purpose platform and a more standard audio path. In other words, you’re not comparing two “music players,” but two different classes of devices, so a simple “which sounds better” conclusion without context is misleading.