Customer Reviews

Casio Cassiopeia EM-500 Color Pocket PC (Slate Blue)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I rate this product with 4 stars. Nothing receives 5 stars, that would imply perfection, and no room for improvement.

It's hard to compare this with a Palm Pilot, because they're so fundementally different, but that is exactly what the target is. I have a Palm IIIxe, which may not be the top-of-the-line Palm, but is functional, and use this as a comparison to the Cassiopeia EM-500.

Cost: the Palm IIIxe is half the price of the Cassiopeia, but if you compare the Palm IIIc, then the price range narrows where it's no longer an arguement.

Size: the size is similar enough that any arguement of which is smaller/bigger is a lot of hot-air. The Cassiopeia is substationally heavier than the Palm.

Processor: people make a big fuss over processor speed. The Cassiopeia has a 150MHz MIPS processor. The Palm has an unknown speed 68k-based processor.

Screen: The screen is bigger than a Palm, and needless to say, it's color. It's very sharp and easy to read.

Sound: The Palm has no functional sound to speak of. It's capable of emitting beeps reminiscint of the Apple II.

Battery: The Palm here wins flatout. Lifetime on the Palm far exceeds the Cassiopeia. The Palm uses AAA batteries, and the Cassiopeia uses rechargable batteries.

Memory: The Palm again wins here. The IIIxe has 8mb of RAM, and the operating system is extremely efficent with memory allocation. The Cassiopeia has 16mb, and I've already started to run out of memory. I have a full KJV Bible installed on my Palm, as well as several other apps, and still have over 5mb of free memory. I installed a single 7mb MP3 on the Cassiopeia, and have no room left. Memory management for the Cassiopeia is bizzare - you select, via a slider, how much memory to allocate to storages vs. programs. I

Expansion: The only Palm-type product to offer reasonable expansion is the Handspring Visor. The Cassiopeia EM-500 does not use Compact Flash cards, but rather something called "MMC". The CF-style handhelds offer a wider range of expansion - such as modems, network cards, physical drives, and so forth. The MMC seems to limit me to multimedia storage expansion only.

Syncronization: Microsoft's ActiveSync is much better than HotSync. When you plug the Cassiopeia into the sync cable, the machine stays synced during the entire process. Also, the interface is nicer. If you want to install files/programs, you use an already familiar Explorer-like window to drag items into and out of the Cassiopeia. Updates occur async, so you can continue to use the Cassiopeia while syncs are happening.

Operating System: The Palm wins here. PocketPC Windows is very confusing, and the screen is incredibly cluttered. I would like if there were alternative OS's available for PocketPC, such as NetBSD.

Handwriting: this is hard to compare. Both products offer handwriting recognition systems, and also offer on-screen "soft" keyboards. The Cassiopeia was sometimes too fast to recognize my characters before I was done with them. I like the ability to see the on-screen results of my handwriting on the Cassiopeia. You can add several hacks to the Palm to do simiar, but it's not a base feature.

Third-party software: forget about it. The Palm has an enormous base of software applications.

Applications: The apps are similar across platforms, but I find the Palm versions of the apps easier to use. Everything is readily available at the touch of a single button. You may need to wrangle a few menus on the Cassiopeia to find what you really want.

Bottom line: this is a fine computer product. If you're interested in a personal organizer, I would stay towards the Palm Pilot. If you're interested in an alternative to laptops, with all the bells and whistles, the Cassiopeia is a good choice.

The Cassiopeia EM-500 looks like a pretty sweet deal. It can do almost anything the E-115 does, and it's smaller and faster. If you compare the EM-500 to the E-115, you'll notice that the E-115 has 32MB of memory, where the EM-500 has 16MB. Also, the EM-500 offers the multimedia card memory system, so memory can be easily expanded.

The EM-500 seems targeted at a younger market, with great multimedia capabilities (MP3, 240 x 320 TFT 65,536 color screen, excellent gamepad).

Its main competitor, the Compaq iPaq, offers more memory and speed, but less colors, and, most importantly perhaps, the keypad of the iPaq cannot register simultaneous clicks, which limits its gameplay capabilities.

If you want a good Pocket PC for both "serious stuff" and games and multimedia, the EM-500 seems the way to go. A fine product by Casio, with more memory I would have given it 5 stars.

I had done a lots of research and finally I bought the Cassiopeia EM-500. I love this unit and highly recommend the Cassiopeia EM-500 and Cassiopeia E-125.

There are so many reviews comparing palms and pocket PCs. Many of the reviews have missed, or are lack of two important factors: the color display ability and the screen display size. They are the major reason for me to pick EM -500.

The pocket PCs have color display ( Cassiopeia e-125 and em-500 have 65,000 colors, the ipaq has 4,096 colors). While all the palms are either black and white or grey scale, except the new visor color model. So if you want to see your photos taken by a digital camera, or movies, colorfull 2d or 3D games, then you would defiantly go for a Pocket PC. For the EM-500, the pictures are sharp, the colors are very rich, and the CPU speed is very fast

Pocket PCs have much bigger screen display and better screen resolution. The Palms use a hardware pat for letter input. This pat chops off almost 1/3 of the screen display. And the Pocket PCs have full screen display. It uses software for letter input so that you can turn the keyboard on and off. So with the Pocket PCs, they display bigger pictures, hold more lines for words, excel and books you're going to read.

Among the Pocket PCs, I tested the Cassiopeia EM-500, ipaq, and HP Jornada. The ipaq has 4,096 colors only. The more color, the better picture quality you can get.. So the ipaq is out of my choice. The Jornada seams running application slower. And the Cassiopeia runs much faster. And I personally like the look of EM-500. It looks sleek and sexy.

I pick EM-500 over E-125 because my digital camera uses MMC. I can just take out the MMC from my digital camera and put it to the EM-500 then watch the slide show. Otherwise I would recommend the E-125 which has more memory and uses CF card for storage, modem and network.

I bought the EM-500 about four months ago. I love the Software that it came with (Microsoft Pocket PC) but since all pocket PCs come with the same software I'm not going to write about how cool the transcriber is and how nice it is to write notes down, and save them.

The things that I don't like about this model are that it doesn't support compact flash. It only supports the Casio micro memory cards which are hard to come by. This also means that you will miss out on all those cool accessories that are compact flash compatible. I also don't like the placement of the IR port (on the right side). If you want to send something, you have to turn it to the right for the IR ports to see each other.

Other than that I really like my EM-500 and I use it all the time for work and personal notes and reminders. I also love reading books on it - I can read a book in bed with all the lights out so my wife can sleep.

The one recommendation I would make to all pocket pc buyers is to invest in a screen cover - the screen can get scratched very easily and if you want to keep it for a while the scratches will start to add up.

I love PDA's (and computers in general, for that matter) and this is an excellent device. There was a time when I swore by Palm's pda's, but while Windows CE (now known as Pocket PC) has evolved to near-desktop power, the Palm has remained virtually unchanged. Of the Pocket PC's available, this unit is the best compromise of size and power. It packs a 150mhz cpu (more powerful than the HP Jornada, less than the Ipaq), 16mb of ram, and an amazing screen capable of displaying 16bit color. The Ipaq and HP Jornada can both only do 12-bit color at best. All of that is packed in a comfortable, small device that feels extremely solid in the hand.

While I do believe the EM-500 is probably the best unit available, it does have a few draw-backs. The miserly 16mb of ram is hardly enough... if you buy this make sure to get a 32mb or 64mb memory card to go with it. My other complaints are minimal: lack of hardware volume control, location of IRDA port... but none of these minor issues really impact the usefulness of the unit.

Definitely a great PDA, and well worth the money.

I bought the EM-500 recently to replace my Handspring Visor. I was always more than happy with the Visor, but wanted to go with a device with a color screen and the Pocket PC operating system. My overall satisfaction has been great, but you really have to know what you're getting yourself into.

Generally speaking, my computer skills are well above average. This has turned out to be a very good thing with the Pocket PC system. I've found it at times more versatile than Palm, at times more familiar (due to the Windowsesque interface), but also frequently frustrating. Because everything's a little more "tweakable" than Palm, you'll find more of a need to get into the details and settings a bit more. If you're comfortable with that, then Pocket PC is for you. If you're looking for simplicity and ease of use, then stick with Palm, even if you're a desktop Windows junkie. Palm is certainly expandable (though arguably not as much as Pocket PC), it's just easier to do so.

A few other things to keep in mind: While the MMC slot allows you additional storage space, it's no help for program memory. Some programs require quite a bit of memory to run (PocketDOOM comes to mind), and if you've stored a lot of stuff on your RAM, then you're out of luck. A 32MB version would've been smart on Casio's part. This brings up another point ... Casio has discontinued the EM-500 line now that the PocketPC 2002 OS is out, so you may want to think about how that might affect you. The EM-500 is NOT upgradeable, and never will be.

That said, my experience with the EM-500 has been great. It's got stereo MP3 playback out of the box, a beautifully rich color screen (though difficult to see out-of-doors), and outstanding expandability. It's given me just about everything the Visor did, and more. Its size (just a tiny bit larger than the Visor) and weight (probably at least twice the weight of the Visor) weren't an issue for me, though you might consider it if you plan to carry this in a pocket. Overall, a great purchase, and I believe the best tradeoff between price and quality on the Pocket PC devices.

It has been in the shop for more than a month now. I guess that means that as of today, it has been away for service for more days than I got to use it in the first place.

I could not keep the screen aligned. When you tap the stylus on the screen, the machine should detect exactly where you tap. You can go through an "alignment" procedure to set the position of the stylus exactly. Unfortunately, the screen would go out of alignment (by one-eighth to one-quarter of an inch) five or six times per day. Every third or fourth day, the screen would go out of alignment by one-half to three-quarters inch.

It did not "drift" out of alignment; it would happen suddenly, in the middle of writing characters, for example. I could see the character being formed directly underneath the stylus, and the very next character would be a quarter-inch above or below the stylus.

So, does this happen to everyone (and everyone else just puts up with it)? I don't know, but I could not get any information from Casio whether this was expected behavior, unusual behavior, a common failure or an unusual failure.

So I shipped it back to Casio factory service in NJ, and cannot find out anything about when (if ever) they will send it back, or if they can fix it or if I'll have to live with it.

I sure wish I had bought an iPaq. Maybe I'll go ahead and order an iPaq; it will probably arrive from backorder before I get the Casio back.

What do I think of my Casio EM500? The best single purchase I have made in a LONG time. The speed is fantastic and compared to an Ipaq - I don't see the difference. I do see a difference in display - the EM500 wins hands down!

I have stored a lot of music and documents on my EM500 and it works great if you're concerned about processor speed. For those music lovers - this is an incredible machine with INCREDIBLE sound. For you productive types like me - this gets the job done - fast - and it's enjoyable to work with too.

And I don't want to forget about the movie player - WOW! I showed my fellow employee's mpeg movies that the EM500 can play - and they were blown away! Don't believe me? Then download some Mpeg's into this machine and see for yourself.

Oh, and for you gamers.... this baby rocks the block - and you can load Mame roms and play the night away. I look at Palm and I recall the days of the old nasty green Nintendo's - YUCK! Color is where it is at!

If I had a PDA on my Holiday list - this is the one I would want someone to buy me! Too late though, I had to have one asap!

This machine is amazing. I can't see why anyone might want the "other" operating system over it.

The screen is clear, the processing is great, and the functioning plus controls are intuitive and well designed!!!

Ok, the one drawback might be lack of software -- but it's slowly coming. You have the strength of Microsoft's R & D plust the fact that it's the same as, for better or for worse, the basic operating system used by 90% of the world. Applications are already coming and you will not have to worry about it. Plus, when you already have Word, Excel, Outlook, Microsoft Reader, and can get streets plus other great classic titles for it, I have not felt burdened by this "lack" of software. Plus, you can web browse if you buy a modem -- at 56.6 connected and a bit slower wireless but that will get faster as time progresses.

Why this Casio?

1. Well, it's the entry level and for students and young professionals, it's great.

2. The screen: It's active matrix (unlike Jornada's more passive screen) and can be seen well in the light or at angles. Plus, it has 65,000 or so colors. It's just so beautiful. If you are going to spend a lot of time looking at something -- let it be beautiful I say.

3. The controls -- This Cassiopeia lets you scroll a screen using a button on the side or the "jog" dial -- WHICH NO OTHER POCKET PC HAS. The "jog" dial is great because you can play a lot more games on it because it always 4 way movement and the other buttons can understand simultaneous and multiple clicks. Quite a few classic arcade games can be used on this device.

4. The MMC Card -- First, people are worried that this type of memory will limit expansion capabilities versus Flash memory. In the short term, that's slightly true, but you can get a lot of expansion utilities or what not for this Cassiopeia nonetheless. Serial modems are available, and, I think you can also get a serial expansion device that accepts Flash memory. I am not entirely sure on that point, but you can always get a Flash reader, Active Sync to your computer and read from Flash in that sense. Also, MMC memory seems to be very price competitive [with the] Flash memory. Please verify that for yourself, but in the initial term I feel it's true. Finally, the MMC are very small so it's not going to sacrifice design as much as Flash might. The industry sees the obvious benefits of MMC cards and will support them fully. You should really not be wary of this memory choice on this machine.

5. Casio has great multimedia support. They have their own video viewers but can also easily use all the regular WinMedia, .wav, mp3, or mpeg files.

6. The character recognizer seems very excellent. I have not had trouble with it and I have not even consulted the character guide all that much. It's intuitive. Plus, if you get the Pocket PC's for Dummies book..., you can get Microsoft Transcriber (plus a whole host of other utilities) which can understand connected, cursive handwriting!

7. The transfer of the files is real simple. Active Sync is easy to set up if you have USB and it's just essentially dragging then dropping the files. The Pocket PC comes up as a new disk on your computer is all. If I want to listen to a couple songs on the way to work or while outside, I just drag then drop the files to my Pocket PC. Since the memory can go up to a lot of megs (64, but you can substitute the cards!) -- you can get quite a few songs on it.

8. The reader plus web browsers are great! -- Even if you decide against buying the modem to surf the web with it -- you will still be able to get pages offline and read them later. Some news and entertainment sites are already set up for it. And, the navigation through them on the Pocket PC screen is very close to actual web browsing. I'll no longer have to fold the paper or whatever on the subway -- I'll just be able to get the day's news in the morning and look it at through the Pocket PC.

9. The Pocket PC is only going to get better and [less expensive]. Ok, I am not entirely sure about this one -- it's hard to predict in the future -- but with the strength of Microsoft and some high profile manufacturers behind it, I have already seen the technology improve and the prices drop in the year or so it's been introduced. I got this machine because it is one of the cheaper ones and it will allow me to get used to the Pocket PC until I can afford/understand a Pocket PC that has all the bells and whistles (wireless modem, printer outputs, scanning, etc., etc.!) later.

10. This machine really has no incredibly visible drawbacks. The battery life is decent it seems. The design is great. The weight is not too burdensome. [The money] is still a bit steep for a PDA, but the upside on this machine is amazing. If you are looking for a great entry level PC that will let you get familiar with all a great PDA is able to do, is incredibly cohesive with your desktop, and has strong potential -- this machine is for you. The price is steep but -- look at it this way -- if you are going to use a machine for two years or so it comes to near 50 cents a day -- that's not a bad price for so much at your fingertips! I really wish it be [less expensive], but we can't have everything. This machine comes close to getting you there however!

I compared my EM-500 to a Palm and there was no comparison. Next I compared it to the Jornada and the Ipaq. With the Jornada, there was again no comparison. The Ipaq beat it out in one area only - speed - but barely. In a side by side test the Ipaq only opened programs a fraction of a second faster with the single exception of MS Reader where the Ipaq was much faster. Size? The Ipaq and EM-500 are comparible. Screen? The EM 500 wins hands down. I compared them side by side at Best Buy and everyone around me chose the EM 500. THe Ipaq just looked a little washed out. Memory? The EM 500 at Christmas was [$] with a free 28 meg card. That gives it 44 megs of total memory compared to Ipaq's 32 megs at [$100 more]. If I have to choose between the Ipaq or EM 500 at the same price, The EM 500 wins especially with its free memory card. In this case, the EM 500 is actually cheaper!