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While most users of personal digital assistants think Palm is the only name they need to know, Casio's $499 Cassiopeia EM-500 is one of a new--and more colorful--generation of Windows-powered Pocket PC handhelds. Thanks to improvements such as brighter color screens and multimedia functionality, these devices are part of a new PDA generation that could give the folks at Palm reason to pause.

Available in five luscious colors (blue, sky blue, yellow, green, and red), the slim EM-500 sports a familiar Windows interface. You can easily get used to the miniaturized Windows menus, icons, and navigation scheme that have been reformatted to fit the device's 240-by-320-pixel, thin-film transistor LCD screen, which can display 65,536 colors.

Pocket PCs have been slow to make inroads against Palm's huge lead in the handheld market, in part because of the legacy of Windows CE. Previous Cassiopeia EM models were prone to crashing, especially when handling music files, but the EM-500 didn't crash once during my two weeks of informal testing. Earlier versions were also criticized for their poor handwriting recognition, but after I took about a minute to get acquainted with it, the feature worked flawlessly for me, and I have the handwriting of a physician who's taken one too many cups of coffee.

Bundled with the device are Pocket versions of some of your favorite desktop applications, including Microsoft's Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Reader, Outlook, Windows Media Player, and Money, along with Casio's picture viewer and video player. With Microsoft's ActiveSync 3.1 software, sychronizing files between the EM-500 and my desktop was easy.