 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: Casio Cassiopeia E-125 Color Pocket PC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
User Submitted Casio Cassiopeia E-125 Color Pocket PC Reviews (cont...)Date: 2001-08-04 Dont even bother Ok, this is a pocket pc not even worth gettin'. The only reason you would actually want one is for the 16bit color. But if all you want a pocket pc for is to play games and what not, because thats all this ppc is good for, then you might consider buying. If you want a pocket pc for either business or school i would sugjest getting either the HP Jornada or iPAQ. The HP is better for price and quality but the iPAQ has more speed, depends on personal preferance. Now, going back to the Casio, if you want to waste your money on a PDA that has only one good feature(16bit color) then go ahead. Like i said before this one is good for games but who wants a pocket pc that lasts anywhere from 3-6 hours? Thats not very reliable now is it. See this happened to my friend who goes to high school with me. He was playing games and fooling around on it during most of our first classes. When he was getting ready to synch on one of the school computers to print off his homework(well we synch at school because its easier that way)well anyway, he went to synch and the battery warning came up. The battery ended up dying on him before he could print up his paper. So, you know how strict high school can be, gave him an F on his paper. Afterwards I went up to him and told him quietly "Told ya so". See what happened was me and went looking for a ppc together a week before high school stared. I bought the HP Jornada 548, He bought teh Casio E-125. I told him before he bought it that it isnt very good on battery life but he said he didnt care he wanted it because of color(stupid thing to do). Well when you go looking out to buy a pocket pc make sure you consider the following: Price, Speed, quality of product and manufacturer. You all know how dependable anything HP makes. You can be kind of iffy on the Compaq and just dont waste your time wuth the Casio. Plus it all has to do with pesonal preferance as i said before. I guess in writing this im trying to promote the Hp Jornada but i still havn't put down the other two(well besides the battery life on the Casio) Thank you for taking the time to read my review and i hope you make the right choice when buying a pocket pc. Date: 2001-07-31 best Pocket PC at the moment I think the Cassiopeia E-125 is the best of the current Pocket PC devices. Unlike the various Jornadas, it is stylish. And unlike the iPAQs, it doesn't have any glaring hardware deficiencies (iPAQ: dust under the screen, occasional reversed screen, nonreplaceable battery). The E-125 display is bright and beautiful, brighter than I thought I'd ever see on a handheld device. Some things I discovered: The technical specs say Windows 95 is supported. What they don't tell you is that you get a USB cradle with the E-125 but only serial (RS-232) syncing is supported under Windows 95. So if you're using Windows 95 you'll have to either buy a serial cable or hope that you can get infrared syncing to work (I couldn't). The same is true for Windows NT 4. Windows 98 + USB works fine. If you're using USB for syncing, you cannot do a full backup of the device without installing a fix onto the E-125 for the USB driver. Without the fix the backup will run for a while and then get stuck. The built-in handwriting recognition works but only if you draw your letters exactly as the recognizer expects. The recognizer cannot be trained to understand your handwriting. This is little better than Palm's Graffiti, but at least you don't have to learn the Graffiti chickenscratch. There is a better handwriting recognition product available called Transcriber. It has much better default recognition and it is trainable for problem characters. Transcriber is free and downloadable from Microsoft's web site It is also on the ActiveSync CD that comes with the E-125. Lefties should note that this is a right-handed device. Both the hardware buttons and the scrollbars on the appplications are laid out for righties. Under Windows every application has a little 'X' at the top right of the window frame that you can use to close the app. That 'X' is not present on Pocket PC apps, which makes it somewhat cumbersome to close applications. The fastest way to close an app is by typing ctrl-q at the onscreen keyboard. This works with all the builtin applications. I rate the E-125 four stars for an excellent device with some software issues. If you would buy this unit for some particular application (Pocket Explorer, Pocket Excel, etc.) check Internet resources to verify that the applications have the features you need before laying down your money. All "Pocket" versions of Microsoft applications have missing features that may be critical to you. COMPAQ Ipaq 3650 HP Jornada Casio Cassiopeia E-125 All the compelling reasons are there for them all. But in the end, I thought, what would be the REAL reason for having a portable system with me. Data storage? Processor power? Screen magnificence. The CASIO won out hands down with literally ALL of the above. It's size disadvantage is really not a disadvantage at all. I don't believe I would trust myself to put an expensive device in my pocket and have me absentmindedly bump into a chair or something and break it. My CASIO is safely in my portfolio. It's light, convenient and POWERFUL. I use an Access compatible database program to actively use my Casio at work. Money works fabulous on it, and the Activesync link is flawless. It works each and every time and syncs everything. All in all, I could not be happier with this little powerhouse. I love it and recommend it WHOLEHEARTEDLY! PS: Pick up a pack of PDA SCREEN WRITERIGHT plastic protector sheets. They give a total sense of security. First of all, the modem that Amazon was offering for free with this did not work, and between calls to Casio, the modem manufacturer, and my ISP, I finally figured out that I had to donwload a new driver from the web, which was not mentioned anywhere in any documentation. Since there is no diagnostic tool included on Windows CE 3.1, I couldn't even tell what was wrong. Very frustrating for a week or so. Also, the files can be tough to delete..how do you delete a recording????...and the inability to close running programs is a BIG change to get used to. Loading programs from the web, through active sync and onto a compact flash card that is attached to the unit is also a challenge as I try to figure that one out as well. There are also a few other things that I won't bore you with, but my point is that if you are expecting anything close to the familiarity of windows 98 on your Pocket PC, you have some learning to do. However, once you get used to this, the CASIO will be one of the best investments you will make, just be prepared to invest some time in trying to figure out how everything works, especially since documentation overall is very weak. All in all, I'm very pleased with my purchase! I tried buying a new battery, but nothing: it was something inside... So, I decided to call Casio, to see what they could do for me. Either their customer service is terrible in general, or they just didn't care about 'old' Windows CE-based Cassiopeia E-100 users, now that they had released their 'new line' of Pocket PC-powered PDAs. The fact was that after looking for a painfully long time for repair center information, I was finally able to talk to a person, in order to find out about what would it entail to repair my PDA. She said to me that it would cost me $250. I asked her why, if they didn't even know what the problem was... Apparently, that's the standard charge for repairing anything with them, which, as you may realize is a mjor turn-down. I told myself: "for $250 I can get myself one of those Palm-based PDAs". So I did, and I ended up selling it, because it's not even half as good as Windows-powered PDAs. BUT, I will not buy any more Casio PDAs, until I hear a very good story about their service. For now, I will get myself a Compaq iPac.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ©2004 SimplyHandhelds, All rights reserved. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
