Pocket viewer
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Pocket Viewer (Casio PV) was a model range of
personal digital assistant A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in partic ...
s (PDAs) developed by
Casio is a Japanese multinational electronics manufacturing corporation headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Its products include calculators, mobile phones, digital cameras, electronic musical instruments, and analogue and digital watches. It ...
around the turn of the 21st Century.


Description

Pocket Viewer was a model range of PDAs from Casio. Early models used
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...
based processors (manufactured by
NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...
). Later models used
Hitachi () is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group (''Hitachi Gurūpu'') and had formed part of the Ni ...
processors from the
SuperH SuperH (or SH) is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hitachi and currently produced by Renesas. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems. At t ...
family. Both models ran Casio's proprietary OS 'CASIO PVOS'. The functionality of the pocket viewers extended beyond the digital diary segment and targeted consumers who needed more compute power in their personal organizers. The pocket viewers competed directly with the then market leader in the segment the Palm-pilots. They were priced under $200 at first release. The pocket viewers, weighing under 5 ounces, were light and portable. The face of the device was almost entirely covered by a monochrome
liquid crystal display A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat panel display, flat-panel display or other Electro-optic modulator, electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liqui ...
. Towards the bottom of the LCD there were a few navigation keys. The lower most part of the LCD had quick short cuts to the standard applications permanently indicated. The short-cuts include off, back-light, Scheduler, Contacts, Quick Memo, Sync Start, Escape, Menubar. The standard applications available on the pocket viewer include Expense, PVsheet, Quickmemo, Contacts, Scheduler, ToDo list, Reminder/Calendar and Alarm. The starting interface consisted of a scrollable two column list of icons. Clicking on the icon starts the application. Text was entered via an on-screen keyboard. The pocket viewer did not have in-built hand writing recognition support. A third party GPL addin PVMerlin may have attempted to provide hand writing recognition. Pocket viewers used conventional 2 x AAA batteries and under normal use a completely charged battery lasted around 2 months. When not actively being used the pocket viewer switches off the display and goes into power saving mode. The specifications stated that it could function for 50 hours on alkaline batteries without use of back-light. Except for PV-S1600 which used
Universal Serial Bus Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
(USB) 1.0, all the other pocket viewers used a COM (
RS-232 In telecommunications, RS-232 or Recommended Standard 232 is a standard originally introduced in 1960 for serial communication transmission of data. It formally defines signals connecting between a ''DTE'' (''data terminal equipment'') such a ...
) port to communication between a personal computer and the pocket viewer. Casio made the pocket viewer SDK available. Using the SDK users could create their own applications called add-ins, which could be downloaded to the pocket viewer using the synchronization software. In time, a small user base who created and made their add-in applications available on-line for free or for profit emerged. User forums such as pocketviewer.de, pocketviewer.com, pocket-viewer.ru and pocketviewer
webring A webring (or web ring) is a collection of websites Hyperlink, linked together in a circular structure, and usually organized around a specific theme, often educational or social. They were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among a ...
s flourished in their time and have since closed. During 2005-2010, the second hand market was on the wane.
OWBasic OWBasic is an interpreted language environment that can be downloaded to Personal digital assistants like the Casio's Pocket viewer. Description Casio issued an SDK which amongst other things produced a programmable interpreter/compiler called OWB ...
, a third party add-in, provided the easy to learn and use
BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...
interpreted programming language on the hand-helds, expanding their functionality to also being programmable hand-held calculators/computers. The device had the computer power and functionality as the home computers of the 80s. The pocket viewers ability to access the internet was limited. PC software could synchronize email with the device which was not convenient. The device had a specialized serial port, and could theoretically communicate with other devices using the
Serial Line Internet Protocol The Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) is an encapsulation of the Internet Protocol designed to work over serial ports and router connections. It is documented in . On personal computers, SLIP has largely been replaced by the Point-to-Point ...
and execute modem
AT commands The Hayes command set (also known as the AT command set) is a specific command language originally developed by Dennis Hayes for the Hayes Smartmodem 300 baud modem in 1981. The command set consists of a series of short text strings which can b ...
. Casio also provided some additional applications. Enterprise Harmony, which enabled Outlook 2003 synchronization of Outlook contacts, calendar On windows. PVsheet, a spread sheet application, which could upload/download comma separated spread-sheets. Travel phrase guide, which could translate preset text between English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese. The Casio pocket viewer series was sandwiched between digital dairies and the pocket PC series Casio Cassiopeia. Casio discontinued the pocket viewers as the pocket PCs became popular and their price came down.


Models


Gallery

File:Pv100.JPG, PV-100 File:PV-S1600_1_small.jpg, PV-S1600


Technical details

* The PV-100 did not have a back light. While the back light was available on PV-200 onwards, Casio by default did not allow the back-light to remain on more than 30 seconds. Casio did not recommend extending the duration of the back light citing damage and battery drain. as A third party application back light extender add in was required to keep the back light on beyond the default duration. The back-light was Casio's trade marked EL-back-light, which is an electro-luminescent panel that causes the entire face to glow. * The PV-S1600 did not use a NEC V30MZ processor, but used a Hitachi SH-3. The processor architectures are not compatible hence programs compiled for the earlier architectures do not work on the PV-S1600 without recompilation. OWBasic programs will work as they run in an interpreter. * The NEC V30MZ was a 16 bit processor which used a segmented memory space. An indirect consequence is that those models can download a maximum of 16 addins * The file system is divided into PVOS modes and sub modes. Each record is part of a file that is specified by mode and submode. Depending on the mode data sets are null-terminated in either binary or text format. Binary data sets are to 3 KB or 32 KB (records that are greater than 3 KB, can be loaded only into the far-segment, PV-S1600 has no restriction), text data sets to 2 KB (PV-S1600: limited 32 KB). * The PV-750 has an IrDA port. Using IrDA, it is possible to send and receive email messages using a GSM-enabled mobile phone. SMS can also be sent on the PV-750Plus. The address book of the mobile phone can also be synchronized with that of PV. Casio's operating system update for the PV-750 gives it the same functionality of the PV-750Plus.


Notes

* The HP 200LX a palm top computer, also used an 80186 chip * The
Casio ClassPad 300 The Casio ClassPad 300, ClassPad 330 and fx-CP400 are stylus based touch-screen graphing calculators. It comes with a collection of applications that support self-study, like 3D Graph, Geometry, eActivity, Spreadsheet, etc. A large 160x240 pixel ...
is a maths orientated update of the pocket viewer. * Casio did not provide any official linux support. Casio had contracted a 3rd party vendor for PC communication, and hence could not disclose any internal communication protocols. Apart from Casio PC sync and Enterprise Harmony, shareware Xlink/Win also provides communication with windows. An open-source GPL Linux application by the name PVlink is available with limited guarantees. * Since Casio PVOS was a small proprietary OS, it did not benefit from mainstream platform support that Linux, or other proprietary OSes such as
Pocket PC A Pocket PC (P/PC, PPC) is a class of personal digital assistant (PDA) that runs the Windows Mobile or Windows Embedded Compact operating system that has some of the abilities of modern desktop PCs. The name was introduced by Microsoft in 2000 ...
or
Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provi ...
had.


References


External links


Casio archive of industrial devices

Casio pocket viewer FAQ

Casio PV downloads





Fabio Fumi's Casio Pocket Viewer page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pocket Viewer Personal digital assistants Casio personal digital assistants Computer-related introductions in 1999