Ultra Cool, Useful, and Fun!
Written: Feb 07 '01 (Updated Jun 16 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cool multimedia features, more than a simple PIM, Pocket Office, beautiful color screen
Cons: Battery life, lack of peripherals, bigger than Palm V
The Bottom Line: The Casio Cassiopeia EM-500 has given me a very pleasant multimedia experience: video, MP3, Word, Excel, Quake... Can your Palm do that? No!
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| hbj200's Full Review: Casio Cassiopeia EM-500 Pocket PC |
I paid $250 for my Palm IIIxe and never used it as anything more than an expensive PIM (Personal Information Manager). But with the Casio Cassiopeia EM-500, I have been having so much fun since I bought it 6 months ago -- and actually getting some real work done on it as well.
What attracted me to the Pocket PC platform in the first place was its wide variety of functions. The Palm, at least to me, was just a very expensive electronic organizer. Sure there's software available for the Palm, but the lack of color and meaningful sound and the simplicity of its software (due to the Palm's lack of computing power) make the platform often less than pleasant to use.
The Pocket PC, on the other hand, comes with Pocket Word and Pocket Excel, and I can actually use these applications to get some work done while on the road. For example, every day after work I download the one or two Word documents I was working on to my Casio, and then on my long subway ride home I can edit them. The next morning I just upload them back to my work PC. All the formatting is preserved. No hassle whatsoever. I use Pocket Excel to do some simple testing on my financial models. This alone is truly a God-send.
Besides these two applications and the Pocket Outlook suite (Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes), I use Pocket Money (together with Money 2001) to track my personal finance, and can read e-books on Microsoft Reader. (Many e-books are free on the Internet and some new books are available for purchase from Amazon.com and BN.com.)
Want multimedia? Out of the box you get Windows Media Player 4.01, which plays WMA (windows media audio) files. WMA is a format akin to MP3 but with better quality-to-file size ratio. A desktop program converts MP3 files to WMA and downloads it to your Pocket PC. A 64MB expansion card can hold almost 2 hours of near CD-quality audio. Not bad, huh?
The coolest programs available for the Pocket PC -- these you download for free from the Internet -- are Pocket TV, Quake and Doom4CE. With Pocket TV you can view MPEG videos! That's right, if you have enough memory you can view an entire movie in MPEG on your Pocket PC. Casio also provides a program called "Picture and Video Viewer" that can play a proprietary video format. A desktop program is included that converts MPEG (and other video formats) to the Casio format. Either way, you can download video clips (like South Park episodes!) from the Web and play them on your Casio.
Doom4CE and Quake are Pocket PC versions of the popular first-person shooter games. Full action and full sound! If you don't like shooters, you can get many other full-color games.
So far I have talked about the general laudable features of the Pocket PC platform. The Casio Cassiopeia EM-500 stands apart from Pocket PC offerings from Compaq and HP in that it has superb multimedia features.
First there's the beautiful TFT Active-Matrix LCD screen, which can display 65,536 colors. This means when you look at a JPEG image, you get the smoothest colors. The contrast and brightness can be adjusted.
Then the EM-500 also comes with terrific sound. While the speaker is small (nonetheless an improvement over the E-105 and E-115), you get full stereo sound if you use headphones. The bass is rich and the range impressive. On my subway ride home whether I work on Word or Excel or look at downloaded web pages (via AvantGo), I also let Windows Media Player play my favorite music. (Yep, the Pocket PC employs preemptive multitasking.)
Overall the Casio is easy to use. If you are like me and switch from Palm to Pocket PC, it takes little time to get used to the more natural handwriting system and the user interface. (In fact, Pocket PC can also let you use the Graffiti shorthand system used on the Palm. I use Pocket PC's own system because it's just natural handwriting.)
Pocket PC does have some quirks. In particular, the Pocket Outlook suite is not as intuitive as Palm's simple-yet-elegant interface. For instance, in Calendar you cannot edit a timeslot like you do on Palm; instead you must bring up a form to add or edit an appointment. On the other hand, you can make voice recordings in your notes and attach them to anything in Pocket Outlook. Extremely useful when you, say, do comparison shopping in retail stores.
The Casio comes with a USB syncing cable. There's no cradle, just the cable. Syncing works every time and is fully automatic and quite speedy.
Battery life is perhaps the biggest problem for the Casio. After all, it has a fast processor (150Mhz MIPS), a TFT screen with backlight, and the user is likely to take full advantage of its myriad multimedia features. In my case, I also have a 64MB Multimedia Card inserted so that uses up a lot of power, too. On average, I get about 3 hours of continuous MP3 playing out of each charge; longer when you don't play MP3s. It is advisable that you carry the AC adapter with you at all times. Thankfully the adapter is pretty compact and very light-weight so carrying it won't be a problem whatsoever.
Unlike previous Cassiopeia models, the EM-500 employs a Multimedia Card (MMC) expansion slot. This is rather unfortunately because as of today (feb. 2001) the MMC can only be used for storage but nothing else. While there is an external modem available from Casio for the EM-500, you cannot get an MMC modem because it doesn't exist, yet. By the way, you'll likely get a MMC memory because the EM-500 comes only with 16MB. While that's adequate for non-multimedia use, more memory is needed if you want to play MP3 files and/or watch videos. (64MB MMC costs about $120 in New York.)
Some people complain that a Pocket PC costs much more than a Palm. But considering what you get for the money -- active-matrix color screen, stereo sound, Pocket Office, Doom, Quake and many other full-color programs, videos and MP3s, etc. -- I think it's totally worth the money. Obviously, not everyone is in the market for a truly palm-sized multimedia PC.
Finally, I do think that the Palm series has the best form factor in terms of size and weight, even though its screen is a bit too small for my taste. The Compaq iPaq H3600 is the winner in the Pocket PC camp. The EM-500 does feel -- and is -- larger and heavier than the iPaq. More than anything else, I hope Casio can make their future Cassiopeia's thinner and lighter.
I have written this review from an everyday user's perspective and left out a lot of technical specs. If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at hbj200@hotmail.com.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 349
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hbj200
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Location: USA
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About Me:
I'm poor but I'm proud. I'm a gadget freak. :)
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