Casio Cassiopeia BE-300 Review

Attention, CompUSA Shoppers

Palm OS handhelds are famous for their simplicity, while Microsoft's Pocket PC 2002 platform is pushing powerful PDAs into the corporate enterprise. Casio is aiming to split the difference with what it calls not a Pocket PC but a "Pocket Manager" -- and the lowest-priced color-screened, Web- and e-mail-capable PDA you can buy.

Like Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and NEC, Casio sells a super-deluxe Pocket PC 2002 handheld with a stratospheric $600 price (the Cassiopeia E-200). But the Cassiopeia BE-300, based not on Pocket PC but a variant of Microsoft's older Windows CE 3.0, was introduced a couple of months ago at $300 -- and now that Palm and Handspring have cut their color-screened Palm IIIc and Visor Prism to that level, Casio's lowered the BE-300 to $200, and CompUSA is selling it for $170.

That's an incredible value, and should make the Pocket Manager popular enough to reduce what we admit is its main risk: the possibility of being an orphaned, proprietary PDA like the Royal DaVinci, overlooked by hardware and software vendors' focus on the Palm and Pocket PC markets. Casio's Web site, along with banners urging and offering incentives for software developers to support it, currently offers some two dozen programs for the BE-300, from a few desirable applications like Z4Soft's PTab spreadsheet ($30) and the PocketTV MPEG player ($10) to undistinguished games and to-do and birthday lists.

The PDA has a CompactFlash Type II slot for peripherals like wired and wireless modems and network cards as well as memory storage, but cards you buy off the shelf may not include drivers for it. Casio sells a 56Kbps dial-up modem for $130 and Z-Com 802.11b wireless network adapter for $150, as well as a $160 adapter for PC Cards and $200 digital camera.

But even without add-ons, the BE-300 makes it hard to consider buying a low-end, monochrome handheld. Its 3.2-inch, 320 by 240-pixel display is pleasantly bright and sharp, and shows 32,000-plus colors -- half as many as fancier PDAs, but still plenty for the supplied image and video-clip viewers. It also plays MP3 music files through a stereo earphone jack.

It doesn't have Pocket Word or Excel, but comes with Quick View Plus software to view (but not edit) document and spreadsheet as well as graphics files, and synchronizes address-book, calendar, task-list, and e-mail data with your desktop or laptop PC's Microsoft Outlook. (Users of Outlook Express or other personal information managers are out of luck; the Casio doesn't come with an equivalent to Palm Desktop.)

Its 166MHz NEC VR4131 processor loads and switches among applications quickly, though not instantly, and its handwriting-recognition input is surprisingly accurate, though not perfect. You can also scribble freehand notes or tap on an on-screen keyboard.

And while a bit bulky to ride in your shirt pocket (3 by 4.8 by 0.7 inches), the BE-300 fits neatly into a jacket pocket, and weighs just six ounces (5.9 on our postage scale, or 5.5 without its flip-up plastic screen cover). Add a nicely simple interface, with a full-screen main menu instead of the quasi-Windows Start menu of Pocket PC 2002, and you've got today's best PDA bargain -- not that there seems to be much competition for that title, with the handheld market racing after upscale execs instead of consumers.

Skip To Page • 1 Attention, CompUSA Shoppers 2 Tap and Go

Tools:

Add hardwarecentral.com to your favorites Add hardwarecentral.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x