A good PocketPC for the budget conscious
Written: Dec 16 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: MMC expansion slot, great color screen, price
Cons: Not enough memory, could be faster, easily scratchable screen
The Bottom Line: The best PocketPC PDA you can get for its price range... although with a few shortcomings.
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| moomadcow's Full Review: Casio Cassiopeia EM-500 Pocket PC |
Once in a while you get a device while it's new and hot, and forget to tell anybody else about it (at least on Epinion)... this is one of those times...
I've had the EM-500 for almost a year now. At that time, I was looking for a PocketPC-based PDA for their expanded capabilities that are far beyond those PDA based on PalmOS. EM-500 was probably the cheapest PocketPC PDA on the market, hence the reason why I got it. I also got the gold color which seems to be the most unpopular amongst its buyers, since I've snatched the last ones before they were discontinued.
So to break down the EM-500, let's look at several aspects of this PDA, hardware specs, performance, and usability.
Hardware Spec:
PocketPC OS
16MB non-flashable ROM
16MB RAM
Removable lithium ion battery
Secondary backup battery
150mhz MIPs CPU
16-bit (65,000 color) active TFT screen
Multimedia Card expansion slot
Earphones with remote control
Performance:
The biggest shortcoming of this PDA has to be the miniscule memory size. While 16MB of RAM is more than any typical PalmOS based PDA (which ranges from 2MB to 8MB), since PocketPC OS is actually a variant of WindowsCE, which is actually based on the same kernel as WindowsNT (yes, based on the same kernel you're running WindowsXP on as well... although not the *same*, but "based" on the same...), its applications can also be quite large compared to the typical application size in PalmOS.
While a PalmOS application typically eats up a few KB of memory space, there are plenty of PocketPC apps that'll take 1 or 2 MB. Given as in any PDA, that RAM is shared between storing application as well as running them, that gives you even less space to play with. This is even more critical with a PocketPC device, because PocketPC device does in fact do real multitasking. You can be using Media Player in the background while looking through Internet Explorer, and Media Player is actually running in real timee. As opposed to PalmOS, when you start a different application, your current app is terminated, and its state stored in memory to be recalled again... This may seem very trivial, but when you're sitting in a train commuting to work, listening to music and browsing the top news of the day on Avantgo makes a huge difference than when I had a Handspring Visor.
Given that the memory size is limited, it's a good thing that there's memory expansion option in the form of a Multimedia Card. Multimedia cards is a very small memory card in the approximate size of a postage stamp. The slot is also compatible with SecureDigital card as well after a software update. You can install applications in the expansion card, and store MP3's and other files on them as well... however running them will still eat up your memory, although it's much better than not having it at all.
However, the choice to go with only SD also caused one major dilemma. Since most other PocketPC's has CompactFlash expansion slot (for good reason as well, since CompactFlash, unlike MMC and SmartMedia, is the only expansion card with built-in I/O on the card, hence giving it the ability to be much more than just a memory card... it can be a network card, modem, and so on...), there's very little available expansion devices other than memory. In fact this is the same problem that Palm is facing with their M-series Palms.. which was supposed to have a market of SD-slot compatible devices, but none has seen the light of the day yet.
Of course no good PDA can go without a good screen, so Casio has packed in one of the best and the brightest screen there is. Although technically there's a lot of other PDA's with 16-bit color, none of them look as bright and sharp as the one on this screen. However, the decision to go with an active TFT, which contributes to how great this screen looks, also means abandoning the ability to view the screen outdoors in bright daylight. This is no problem to me, since I sit in an office most of the day; it may however become an issue for the road warriors. Again, a design shortcoming seems to haunt Casio at every step... The screen itself has a surface that's very easily scratched. In fact, on the very first day I received my EM-500, I placed a mighty scratch on the screen with the included stylus. Although the screen is probably the most tactile one that I had ever written on for such a device.. it's so fragile now that after a year, I must have a thousand tiny little scratches all over the place.
EM-500 also has a very good battery life, running for about 6 hours continuously between charges. Also it comes with a removable battery, unlike many other models, and a secondary lithium battery to give it just enough juice when the main battery runs out of charge so you don't lose all your data (as with all PDA's.. data's stored in RAM, therefore volatile, if you lose the power to it, you'll lose your data.. synching and back-up to a PC is a very good practice).
The last two shortcoming of this device though, the CPU speed and the non-flashable ROM. The non-flashable ROM means no way to upgrade the device to PocketPC 2002, and even OS patches and updates has to be installed in RAM, further eating up the measly 16MB. Casio should've also gone with the 206mhz ARM CPU instead of the 150mhz MIPs CPU... its speed makes enough of a difference.. especially when playing multimedia movie clips, you notice a drop of frame rate as compared to the Compaq iPaq.
Usability:
The EM-500 has a direction pad that's placed on the side with separate buttons to the right, aligned much like a Nintendo controller (instead of the iPaq design where the pad and the speaker are integrated into one piece in the center of the device), and in a sense, that's the biggest advantage in usability, especially when playing games. I still don't understand Compaq's design decision to have a big direction pad in the middle that's placed directly over the speaker.. I never found it as usable as the one on the EM-500.
The screen surface of the EM-500 is by far the best writing surface I've ever encountered in a PDA. However it is recommended to invest in a better stylus than the one that's bundled with the EM-500. The stylus that's bundled with the EM-500 actually has a tendency to make permanent, deep scratches in the screen.
My EM-500 also came with the optional earphone remote control for controlling Media Player. However, the earphone are permanently attached (and those earbuds aren't too comfortable nor good quality), and the remote only works with the version of Media Player that shipped with the EM-500, if you upgrade to the newest version, then it is again useless.
Overall, there is nothing that can't be expected from a PocketPC here.
So in conclusion, the EM-500 has its shortcomings, and there are many of them.. however for the price (and now with PocketPC 2002 out on the streets, you can expect the price to drop even lower), you really can't get a better PocketPC... I still much rather spend the money on this than any PalmOS-based PDA.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 369
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Epinions.com ID:
moomadcow
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Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 1 member
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