great pda for the money
Written: May 19 '02 (Updated Jun 18 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: style, cost and o/s.
Cons: bulky size, limited 16 mb ram, unreadable screen under sunlight
The Bottom Line: good enough for the money spent on a cool toy.
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| ili1328's Full Review: Casio Cassiopeia EM-500 Pocket PC |
I bought it refurnished-new from ubid for 180$.
There are many things I like about it: the very pretty green cover and the great screen color resolution. A huge plus, for me, is the o/s windows ce; I am used to the window o/s and I like the familiarity of it. Character recognition is very good, it took me about a day of playing with it to get the hang of it. Scheduling, contacts, MSN money are the most useful features for my graduate student lifestyle, and it is great if you have MSN outlook on your desktop too. It synchs smoothly with it so you don't have to do double entry. Other good features are task and notes. Basically it reduced the size of my purse by 2/3.
I appreciate also the mp3 capability, and it was one of the major factor that made me buy this pda. Besides taht, the calculator, MS Words and Excel are just basics that I always use, they have become a necessity to me as a student. A fun and useful future is the voice recorder. It records pretty well, even the background sound of the tv. I use it often everytime I go out and park, to locate my car.
The downsides of this pda are: the bulk, it is big and heavy compared to the slimmer palm. It has the weight of a compact camera, at half the width. What bugs me most is the limited 16 mb of ram. After a week of playing of it, loading it with 1 mp3 song, about 50 entries to addresses, a two months worth of calendar, 3 average resolution photos, 10 tasks, and 20 entries to the MSN money, the pda was just crawling. I found myself waiting 2 minutes to enter a task or change an entry to MSN money. A torture. A solution is to buy a Sandisk 64 mb mmc (60$ delivered), or you can do what I did: deleted the mp3, shortened tasks, and deleted all my photos. This solved the problem. Albeit without the fun things.
Update: I finally figured out the problem with slow memory: if you start getting slow running frames, push the tiny button on the back, "reset" and it will run the pda more efficiently and much faster. This way, you can still keep the picture and mp3 and run a fast pda. It took time to find this since nowhere in the short manual tells you about it.
Anotehr thing, MSN money is great (I don't carry my checkbook anymore, just enter whatever I wd or check number in it) but not good if you don't have the software in your desktop.
Other things that are useless for me: the side and front buttons for the cursors are useless for someone who doesn't play games (I prefer the pen for everything). The pen looks like a cheapo accessory, so is the black vinyl case, so I don't carry it in it.
Update: you need to find some sort of case because battery seems to dry up whenever any button accidentally get pressed inside my purse.
Since I use it 6-7 times a day I find myself charging it every other day for about 4-5 hour.
Overall, I love it. I eliminated my carrying around extra calculator, checkbook, organizer, mp3 player, voice recorder, pen and paper, calendar, and pictures in my wallet and purse. And at 180, it is a great value.
Update: it is still a great value.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 180
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Epinions.com ID:
ili1328
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Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
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