Like many overhyped competitions, the confrontation between Microsoft and Palm Computing for the PDA market turned out to be no contest. The no-nonsense, function-first design philosophy of the Palm Pilot and its spawn handily defeated Microsoft's attempt to fit a desktop operating system into a form factor too small for it.

Despite advantages such as audio recording and easier interfacing with Microsoft's popular desktop applications, Windows CE PDAs represent feature overkill for most users. An overly complex user interface, high price, and poor battery life are generally the deal killers on Windows-based handhelds.

But Microsoft is nothing if not persistent. The folks in Redmond went back to the drawing board and came up with an improved version--the Pocket PC.

As hardware, Pocket PCs are very powerful. The one I've got is the 9-ounce, silver-and-slate-colored Casio E-115. Its 240-by-320-pixel, 65,536-color, TFT liquid-crystal display is luscious with brightness to spare. The unit's 16MB of ROM contains the built-in programs and operating system, and a whopping 32MB of RAM runs applications and stores additional programs and files. A 131MHz processor provides the horses for MP3 audio and MPEG-1 video playback. But the price is a hefty $599.95--$150 more than the Palm IIIc.

I enjoyed using the E-115's physical interface tremendously. A four-way rocker button on the front panel allows easy cursor movement and game play. On the left side of the E-115, an action wheel provides bidirectional scrolling, and simulates stylus taps when pressed. Also on the left side are buttons that launch the audio-recording application and the Windows Start menu, and turn the unit on and off.

Input-output options are abundant. On the left side of the unit are a headphone jack and infrared port. On the bottom are the AC jack and the serial communications port, and on top is a Type I/II, 3.3-volt compact flash slot.

Alas, copious hardware exacts a price. The E-115's battery life, though much better than the two hours I managed with its predecessors, the Casio E-100 and E-150, is barely satisfactory. With the display set to 50 percent brightness, the E-115's Lithium Ion cell lasted only 3.5 hours (far short of the nine hours the Palm IIIc can run at the same brightness level). However, when you're using the E-115 as an MP3 player, you can increase battery life considerably by turning off the screen during playback. If playing solitaire on the airplane is your bag, you should invest in extra batteries ($44.95 retail).

Most of the hype surrounding the Pocket PC concerns Microsoft's reworked CE operating system. Though Microsoft's advertisements claim a total redesign, I found only better multimedia capabilities, somewhat improved performance, and an only slightly more sensible interface.

Most notably, the Start menu has been decoupled from the Taskbar and moved to the top of the screen. I would have appreciated it if everything had been moved to the top, freeing up screen real estate. Instead, the application menus have been shifted to the bottom of the screen onto the task bar. Thanks to the restyling, the net result is a bit less obtrusive, but no more efficient.

Other changes make more sense. My favorites are the five tiny icons in the first menu entry that take you to the most recently used applications. The unwieldy cascading settings and program submenus have been dropped in favor of a tabbed dialog and an icon-based launch application. Toolbars now pop up in the application workspace instead of awkwardly sharing time with the menu.

Character recognition is built into the OS, which offers both Jot- and Graffiti-compatible modes. A media player has been added for playing MP3 audio and MPEG-1 video files.

Ultimately, Pocket PCs are powerful devices that will always have supporters, but a new moniker and some minor cosmetic surgery aren't enough to change the equation. Unless your focus is multimedia, you can do better for less money with a Palm.

Contributing Editor Jon L. Jacobi writes from San Francisco.