Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And if you saw the Cassiopeia E-10 from more than 3m away, you would swear it was a 3Com PalmPilot. In actual fact, it is a Windows CE handheld which provides what most Windows CE machines have failed to deliver to date: pocketable Windows computing.
This little beauty offers a GUI interface with pen input, built-in voice recorder, IrDA window, a CompactFlash slot, a usable and very well-designed touchscreen, a pop-out stylus and a couple of extra controls the PalmPilot would do well to emulate — such as one-touch Return and Escape keys.
After taking the unit out of its box, the user only needs to pop in a couple of batteries, calibrate the stylus and screen and they are ready to go. Like the PalmPilot, the screen is complemented by a line of buttons along the base. These operate power/backlight, and one-touch access to memo, calendar and address listing applications. The side panel includes an earphone socket, the exit/escape button and what Casio calls an Action Button. This acts as both a direction cursor and a return button as the user scrolls and presses it — a little like the IntelliMouse wheel button. The last item on the side panel is the microphone button.
The top of the unit houses the IrDA window next to a CompactFlash slot. If there is a potentially dodgy aspect to this device, it has to be the CompactFlash and serial connection covers. These horrors probably only have a few weeks at most before they break or get lost in real life usage. The case also houses a tiny microphone on the front panel, and a speaker on the back. Inside the case hides an NEC VR4111 RISC chip, 4M of RAM, the two AAA batteries that provide around 40 hours’ normal use (about the same as a PalmPilot), and the Windows CE 2.1 operating system. Included in the pack is a Casio software CD, which offers a range of useful expense, fax, management, image viewing, voice recognition and general maintenance utilities.
The unit fires up notably faster than most CE devices, and a vertical screen displays whichever application was last opened, or the one relating to whichever button was pressed to start up. The actual layout of the address and notetaker screen borrows from Outlook and Schedule Plus screens, and consequently is a bit more fussy and complex than the PalmPilot, although there is customisation on offer. However, the Calendar screens are excellent and include some very neat graphics,
which allow the user to see exactly what is going on right through from the full year to each hour of the day.
In the memo section, Casio has also included basic text recognition. Casio uses Jot, which works almost identically to 3Com’s Graffiti. The user enters standard lower-case letters one at a time on the bottom of the touchscreen, and the system converts them to ASCII. Certain tricks are required to enter some letters, but overall it is slightly easier than Graffiti. If you can’t get the hang of Jot, you can scribble graphic notes, which are stored as bitmaps — but they eat memory space, jot also has another very neat trick up its sleeve in that it can guess words. So if the user enters ‘unders’, a tiny word screen pops up understand’, which can then be ignored or entered automatically — a great time saver but not as annoying as Word’s autospell, because it learns the words you use most. Especially useful for those that use Jargon.
The E-10 also offers voice capability in any one of three modes. These can give from around 15 to 60 minutes’ voice time depending on quality. The playback quality is surprisingly good, and the stored WAV files can be sent to the host PC or via email. Linking to the host PC once Windows CE Services has been loaded allows Web pages to be downloaded for later scanning, but no version of Pocket Explorer is supplied as is.
The connection to the host is made through a very PalmPilot-like docking cradle, but it also features an input for an optional power supply. This can be plugged in if lots of power-gobbling activities are likely to be undertaken. Using the CompactFlash slot pops up a warning as to potential battery drain, but standard RAM cards don’t seem to take any more Juice than normal. One other thing that can eat up power is the backlight, which although very bright and usable also makes a gentle buzzing noise.
Some functions such as search and entry are definitely slower in operation than the PalmPilot; however, the bundled Voice Commander application does allow the user to simply tell the unit to look for a name, which although more time consuming, is definitely easier. The E-10 does have one or two annoying design downfalls, but as a first try by Casio in the handheld format, it is an excellent effort indeed. And at the price, and with seamless Windows interconnectivity, it is going to shake up the pocket computing market without a doubt.
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