Dubbed the Cassiopeia Pocket Manager BE-300, the new color PDA fills a void in the Casio lineup and lays the groundwork for a larger effort by the company in the automotive telematics area.

The PDA employs Microsoft's Windows CE 3.0 operating system and was designed to be particularly strong in the areas of browser capabilities and wireless connectivity, Casio executives said. Introduced at this week's PC Expo in New York, the BE-300 will be supported by a new Casio service called "myCasio," which will provide business applications as well as entertainment, including films, video, animation and games.

"The whole theme for Casio is to drive content to all our devices," said Gary Schultz, Casio's director of product marketing for the Mobile Information Products Division (Dover, N.J.). "And the BE-300 is content-specific: It can get e-mail; it can do wireless connectivity; it can do streaming multimedia."

At a cost of approximately $300, the new PDA is expected to go head-to-head with a number of products from Palm Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) that also sell in the $200 to $400 price range. Casio has offered so-called "Pocket Viewers," which sell in the $100 price range, and Pocket PCs, which sell for between $500 and $1,400, but has not offered products in the $200 to $300 price range — which reportedly constitutes about 35 percent of the market.

"Until now, Casio has not had a presence in the largest portion of the PDA market," Schultz said.

The new device will also help Casio compete in the emerging area of automotive PDAs. During the past year, automotive vendors and PDA makers have come to believe that PDAs could offer a better form of control for dashboard-based telematics systems. Late last year, Palm and Delphi Automotive Corp. (Troy, Mich.) formed startup MobileAria Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), which will develop a docking station to link the information stored in the personal Palm device to a Delphi voice-recognition-based telematics system.

Earlier, Delphi introduced its Mobile Productivity Center, which uses a low-power RF transmitter to enable a Palm V computer to communicate with an unused frequency on a car radio, thus allowing it to read aloud text messages, addresses and other information. By employing a cell phone, the system can also download e-mail, read Internet text and access news, stock quotes and sports scores.

The introduction of the BE-300 signals a step up in the competition between cell phone manufacturers and PDA makers. "Cell phone manufacturers think that their products should control telematics systems, while PDA makers believe that PDAs should do it," said Cindy Wolf, a research analyst for Cahners In-Stat (Scottsdale, Ariz.). "But no one knows yet which way it's going to go."

With the introduction of the BE-300, Casio hopes to place the PDA in the driver's seat. In March, the company partnered with InfoMove Inc. (Kirkland, Wash.), to deliver location-based wireless Internet applications to drivers. The strategic partnership was aimed at delivering InfoMove's back-end infostructure to Casio's Windows CE-based line of handhelds, which then only included Pocket PCs but now also incorporates the BE-300.

"We think the PDA will be the leader in control of telematics systems in the car," Schultz said. "With a PDA, I can get my information at home or in the office, take it to the car, and tap into it at the dashboard. But with cell phone-based systems, I leave all my information behind."

Schultz said that Windows CE was a key to delivering those capabilities. "Because telematics requires such strong browsers and wireless capabilities, we couldn't see using any other operating system," he said.

Windows CE served as the operating system for the Cadillac Infotainment System, unveiled last year, and is said to be the operating system of choice for several other automotive telematics programs. It also offers an advantage because so many developers are familiar with Windows.

"A great PDA needs to be smart and connected," said Phil Shigo, lead product manager for the Embedded Appliance Platform Group at Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, Wash.). "The ability to engage Web pages and transmit over protocols such as TCP/IP is really important."

Casio executives believe that the BE-300's processing power will also be key to its use in content-intense environments. In addition to the 32-bit Windows CE operating system, the new PDA also incorporates a 166-MHz, 280-MIPS NEC VR4131 CPU for high-speed data transfers in wireless environments, along with a 16-Mbyte DRAM, an equal amount of flash ROM and a 32,000-color liquid-crystal display.