Casio Cassiopeia E-115

Casio's been involved in handheld computing from the word go. When Windows CE first burst onto the scene in 1997, Casio was one of the first to jump on the bandwagon with its keyboard-based Cassiopeia A-10. Since then, it's moved into the palmtop arena, a move that culminated in an award in our last palmtop PC round up (see Labs, issue 62, p84), for its stylish E-105. Things have moved on over the past 12 months, however: Compaq has improved its CE offering no end, while HP has had a long overdue rethink. Casio, on the other hand, has rested on its laurels, sticking with the E-105's design and in this business that's not usually a good idea.

Apart from the colour scheme, which is now a dull grey-silver, the E-115 is the physical twin of the E-105. It's just as soundly built and well designed as before but it looks clunky next to the likes of Compaq's iPAQ and HP's Jornada 545. Unfortunately, the same build quality compliments can't be lavished on the docking cradle, which feels cheap and doesn't engage with the Cassiopeia as solidly as we'd like.

Controls consist of three shortcut buttons and a multidirectional navigation key on the front as well as the now obligatory jog shuttle dial on the side. Next to this you'll also find a 3.5mm headphone jack for listening to audio files. Unfortunately, if you plan on transferring lots of music to the E-115 you'll need to prepare yourself for long waits as there's no USB connection (unlike both the Jornada and iPAQ) on offer.

Unlike the Jornada, however, the Casio is able to boast a 240 « 320 active matrix colour LCD screen. It's not as readable in sunlight as the monochrome screens in the PalmOS devices or the Compaq's excellent TFT screen, but is far better than HP's offering, which becomes completely unreadable.

Finally, there's been little change on the specifications front either: powering affairs is a 131MHz processor - fast enough to ensure instantaneous contact searches and fairly speedy application switching, but with the memory loaded to the maximum, things did begin to slow down. The memory also remains the same, with 16Mb of ROM for resident applications and 32Mb of RAM - about as much as you currently need in a device such as this.

Competition in the palmtop PC marketplace has got tougher over the past 12 months, something that's reflected in the E-115's status this time around. It's just as good as it was before - improved thanks to Microsoft's upgrade to its OS - but, unfortunately for Casio, the competition has moved on.