Cassiopeia Pocket PC E-125: Casio’s PDA

The Cassiopeia Pocket PC E-125, packed with powerful features for mobile executives, is the latest palmtop in the Cassiopeia series from Casio. Though its looks are bland, it has an ergonomic

design.

Design

Being 0.75” thick, 3.25” wide, and 5.125” long, the Cassiopeia is bulkier than a Palm or Handspring. But the placement of its buttons is very comfortable. The front panel has a cursor button and three program-launch buttons, which you can configure to launch any program. Here you will also find a tiny speaker, a built-in mic, a start button, and a voice-recorder button. It also has a thumbwheel carousel to navigate through menus, a feature

common to all Casio handhelds. A stereo headphone jack and an infrared port complete the picture. The right side has a recess for the stylus. 

The Cassiopeia’s display is easily readable inside a room, though difficult to read in sunlight. It has a backlit TFT active matrix display that supports 65,536 colors at a resolution of 240x320. It runs Microsoft Windows for Pocket PCs, and has all the standard applications of a personal information manager built-in. It also has utilities for connecting to the Internet and configuring e-mail. Stylus input to the device can be through a graphical keyboard or the built-in handwriting recognition system. We found handwriting recognition to be very accurate, and with a little practice you can use it almost as fast as you write with a pen on a

paper.

With a silvery finish in plastic, the Cassiopeia comes with 32 MB memory. At its heart is a NEC MIPS VR4122 processor clocked at 150 MHz, which gives the device sufficient power to run multiple applications simultaneously. We found we could easily play MP3s on it while working on Pocket Excel or Word. The sound from the speaker is clear enough; so are videos frame rates.

Power is from a user rechargeable Li-Ion battery. The claimed backup is 8 hours, but we could squeeze only about 6 hours. The docking cradle also serves as the USB connection to a PC. For power saving, the device can be set to reduce its brightness or even turn itself off after a specified period of inactivity. You can also backup your data on a memory card. It has a Type II CompactFlash card slot that can be used to attach devices like IBM’s 1 GB Microdrive, modems or Ethernet cards.

You will need to install Microsoft’s ActiveSync 3.1 for your desktop to communicate with the Cassiopeia. When you place the device on its USB cradle, ActiveSync can be set to automatically synchronize data between applications such as mail, Internet explorer channels, or document folders. The same software can also be used to take backups of your PocketPC onto your desktop PC and install and uninstall applications.

However there is one drawback. You cannot close an application once launched. It stays in memory unless you fiddle with the System settings and forcibly stop the running applications. The other problem, of course, is the steep price tag of Rs 40,000.

Ashish Sharma