No More Paper Pills
Written: Jan 05 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Inexpensive
Cons: Needless options you're forced to scroll through
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| TheAdvocate's Full Review: Casio Pocket Viewer PV-400A |
Doctor Reefy, one of the characters in Sherwood Anderson’s American classic, "Winesburg, Ohio," had a curious habit of keeping wadded-up pieces of paper in his pockets. “On the papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.” After they’d spent enough time in his pockets, the papers turned into round, hard balls. “Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor Reefy took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nursery man. ‘That is to confound you, you blathering old sentimentalist,’ he cried, shaking with laughter.”
I used to collect something similar to paper pills in the bottom of my purse. In addition to random thoughts, these scraps of paper contained shopping lists, phone numbers, appointment times, reminders, and email addresses. Because I rarely threw them at anyone, they would collect under my wallet, and I’d be forced to remove them when my wallet could no longer be stuffed down below my purse’s zipper line.
As my title implies, I’m no longer having to manage paper pills, thanks in large part to my Cassiopeia. I bought this device in early December in anticipation of the new millennium (well, the new year, anyway) and after realizing how disgusted I was with the frayed paper edges of my pocket calendar. I was tired of crossing out penned information when my schedule changed. It just didn’t strike me as technological enough for the 21st century.
So I started looking around at various Palm-like devices (including the Palm Pilot, in all of its point-of-purchase, platform-displayed glory) and found myself wondering if I really needed to write myself messages in long-hand, to then be further translated into Palm text. I looked at a list of symbols I’d need to learn in order to communicate with a Palm and decided I wasn’t up to the task, all the more as I realized this long-hand “privilege” would cost me another $50. I decided on the Casio Cassiopeia because it was cheaper and had more memory, 4 megs. Plus, there’s a free-hand memo function called Quick Memo (without a translating feature), so if I absolutely had to write something by hand, I had a creative outlet. At home with the new Cassiopeia, I spent a few minutes acquainting myself with its features, then spent an hour cleaning out my purse.
After using this device for a month, I’ve found that the conversion feature, games, and “secret” area are fine, but I spend my time almost exclusively using the Scheduler, Memo and Expense functions. The scheduler is extremely handy. You can view the calendar one, two, or three months at a time, as well as weekly or daily. These options drop down from a toolbar list, but you can quickly find “Today” by clicking on the square with a dot inside, also up on the toolbar. Clicking once on any day in the monthly calendar reveals a brief list of appointments for that day on the bottom of the screen. Double-clicking on any day reveals more detail on a separate screen. Unfortunately, adding appointments is not as simple as I’d hoped. You must scroll through a list of options you may or may not want to include, including an alarm reminder, the appointment end-time, or a more detailed, memo-like description. Still, even with these superfluities, the time it takes to enter new schedule information runs only about 15 seconds.
Although we have a budget program on our PC that my husband wrote, I obviously can’t bring my PC with me throughout the day. To keep track of what I spend away from home, I tap Expense, then New, and fill in the particulars fairly quickly, although, like entering a new Scheduler item, you’re forced through a series of options you may not need. After a week of inputting various expenditures, I then tap the Sigma symbol to add them up over a specified time period. Unfortunately, the Sigma screen pops up with the current date as both start-date and end-date, with the cursor on the one I don’t want to change: the end-date. This flaw in the architecture forces a few extra steps, but taking an extra 10 seconds out of my day, I can keep track of my week’s running total and avoid stepping over-budget.
The Menu Bar houses all of the basic housekeeping functions. Under Edit you find the delete, copy, and search functions. The System and Option lists allow you to manage the memory, change fonts, align the touch panel, etc., as well as to turn off the cute little touch-blip that becomes tedious on about the third day of use.
So far, I’m pretty happy. The unit is easy to keep clean; smudges and fingerprints on the matte-finished plastic cover come off with a solvent. The indigo screen light is sometimes necessary, when you want to feel organized in a dark room, but it stays on for an annoyingly short time – usually just shy of the number of seconds it takes to enter one Scheduler item. I don’t worry about losing the little plastic pen, as it snaps neatly into a canal groove along the side. And the Memo feature works extremely well for shopping lists and keeping track of rogue thoughts. You might call these new scraps of information silicon pills, but at least they don’t get lost, and they don’t evolve into hard, round balls at the bottom of my purse.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
TheAdvocate
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Reviews written: 53
Trusted by: 98 members
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