Casio Cassiopeia EM-500
After enduring complaints about the heft of its otherwise stellar Cassiopeia E-115, Casio came up with a slimmer and sleeker design for its latest model, the Casio Cassiopeia EM-500. The new size and reduced weight (218 grams) make the Cassiopeia EM-500 easy to fit into a shirt or jacket pocket, yet it feels solid in your hand. The chief drawback to the Cassiopeia EM-500 is that it ships with only 16MB of memory, a curious choice for a "multimedia Pocket PC" (the Compaq iPAQ H3650 offers twice the memory at the same price). And though the MultiMedia Card slot lets you augment the storage, you can't add plug-in accessories such as modems that are based on CompactFlash.
You can choose among five colours of rubberised plastic, but you had better not tire of your colour choice because, unlike with the new Palm m100 that lets you choose from five optional snap-on colours, you're stuck with that one colour. Three hotkey buttons on the front panel provide quick access to the most-used applications, contacts, and calendar, and to the main application menu. The only real design drawback of the Cassiopeia EM-500, as well as the Cassiopeia E-115, is the lack of a hard-shell case to cover the delicate screen, although the included nylon slipcase will protect it from most scratches.
The Cassiopeia EM-500 is Casio's first PDA to employ MMC, SanDisk's MultiMedia Card format. The advantage of MMC is that it offers postage stamp-sized storage in capacities from 8MB to 64MB at about the same price as CompactFlash or Smart Media. The disadvantage is that MMC is strictly for storage, so you can't add CompactFlash-based accessories. The emerging SD (Secure Digital) card standard, which is based on MMC, should support different kinds of accessories, but it is not clear whether the Cassiopeia EM-500 will be able to use SD cards. Since it is impossible to add a CF modem, browsing the Web or checking email in real time is impossible -- you must connect the Cassiopeia EM-500 to your PC and synchronise to read email and Web content offline. Another option is a compact serial port cable that will allow the Cassiopeia EM-500 to connect to certain mobile phones (Qualcomm and Samsung are two of the first vendors with phones that support this feature).
For those downtimes between meetings, the Cassiopeia EM-500 comes with Windows Media Player for listening to MP3 files. And the bundled CSI Mobile Video Converter lets you convert MPEG-1, AVI, and QuickTime files to a format that you can view on the Cassiopeia EM-500. Casio wisely chose to use the Cassiopeia E-115's excellent colour screen on the Cassiopeia EM-500. This TFT screen displays 65,536 colours and looks great both indoors and out, though like most PDA screens it fades in direct sunlight. Images were crisp and clear with good colour saturation all around, and downloaded movies looked great on the little screen. The built-in speaker is a bit tinny and distorted at higher volumes, but that's to be expected from such a small unit. When you plug in a set of headphones, however, the device sounds as good as any stand-alone MP3 player on the market today.
Casio has finally gotten with the 21st century and ditched the pokey serial port connection in favour of USB. This addition, combined with the upgraded Microsoft ActiveSync 3.1, has helped make downloading and syncing email and PIM data faster and easier than before. Transferring MP3s and photos to the Cassiopeia EM-500 was quick and easy, and every transfer succeeded without fail via a simple drag-and-drop interface.
The Cassiopeia EM-500 also packs a slightly faster processor than its portly predecessor, clocking in at 150MHz as opposed to 132MHz. But with only 16MB RAM, the device has barely enough to store all the necessary applications for basic work - you won't have room for an album's worth of songs or a feature-length movie. Compare this with the iPAQ H3650, which has a processor with a faster clock speed (206MHz) and twice the memory for the same price. Nevertheless, the Cassiopeia EM-500 delivered satisfactory performance, taking only a moment to open a lengthy Excel spreadsheet or Word document.
The battery, a lithium-ion pack, is good for over eight hours of steady usage, and it can be charged directly from the unit using the separate wall jack (since a serial port/charger cradle is no longer provided). Listening to MP3 music or watching movies cuts battery time roughly in half, so use the multimedia capabilities sparingly. It seems like the enclosed watch battery would make for a suitable backup power source, but it's only good for keeping the time and date correct between battery charges, not for saving important data. Make sure you back up early and often.
Ultimately, the Casio Cassiopeia EM-500 is caught somewhere between two extremes. On the one hand, if you really use a PDA for looking up phone numbers and keeping track of appointments, you'll be better off with a simpler and less expensive Palm-based organiser. On the other hand, if you really want to take advantage of the multimedia features of the Pocket PC platform, you'll probably be better off with a device that comes with 32MB of memory and supports CompactFlash.
Casio Cassiopeia EM-500
Company:Casio
Ph:02 9370 9100
Price:AU$1,199
Rating:
8%
1%
