John Lettice balanced the Casio FP-200 firmly on his lap and tapped out this Pro-Test

Lap portables have always cost an arm and a leg, and the launch of machines like the Epson PX-8, Apple IIc and Osborne Encore (for more strap than lap) indicates that the manufacturers are heading upwards in pricing rather than down. But as the big boys vacate the lower regions, a gap in the market for a few stripped-down back to basics machines may just be opening. It's this market the Casio FP-200 is aimed at.

For your entry level £350 you get the classic lap-sized wedge shape, containing 8K RAM and a very passable Microsoft-ish Basic, which goes under the nom de guerre of Casio C-85 Basic. The screen is only 20 columns by eight rows, but it's fast and relatively clear, and the keyboard's tolerable. If you're looking for a cheap start in mobile computing this could be it.

The Casio's what the advertising copywriters laughingly refer to as 'book-sized'. This means it's approximately the same size as two medium-sized dictionaries sitting side by side, and exactly the same size as the Epson HX20, Tandy 100 and NEC 8201.

Once you're unboxed, it's a matter of putting two AA size batteries in the back-up battery housing and a further four AAs in the main battery housing and you're ready to go. The machine's on/off switch is on the left hand side of the case, and there's a mode switch on the top right of the main keyboard for Basic or CETL (Casio Easy Table LAnguage), which allows you to switch between Basic and the ROM-based spreadsheet. There's no built-in word processor, so it seems that the Epson HX20 rather than the Tandy/NEC has been taken as the target to aim for.

The review machine came with an unnerving quantity of manuals - the reference manual has an index of commands, but if they'd all had proper indexes I'd have been really impressed. Still, it looks like it's all there, and a modicrum of determination should allow you to dig it all out.

The Operations Manual introduces the machine, and shows Casio's history by leaning heavily on the mathematical role of the micro. A section of program examples includes a sales performance table, mailing list and a Golf Tournament scoring table. This sounds to me a bit like the employment profile of a dynamic young sales rep, and probably tells you a bit about the kind of customer Casio's aiming for.

Next in the logical progression of manuals is the C-85 Basic and CETL Reference Manual. This deals in detail, although not as clearly as I'd have liked, although not as clearly as I'd have liked, with the syntax of the FP-200's commands, and also gives useful information on communicating between CETL and Basic.

The latter seems quite easy, so it's no real trouble to perform mathematical operations on data you keep in your spreadsheet.

The machine language and communications manual should be seen as an example to manufacturers everywhere. It sets out to provide you with a basic grounding in 8085 machine language and also deals with communications using the FP-200's RS232C port.

All three of these manuals suffer from a lack of organisation, but it's good to see a manufacturer willing to give the customer a little more information than is usual.

But this is by no means all. There's also a quick reference guide, and a 160-page tome called Powerful Library of business, utility, maths and games listings, even includes a hex dump and disassembler. The games program I hacked in didn't exactly quicken my pulse, but it's a lot better than the proverbial kick in the teeth. If all micros came out with this little lot attached it'd be at least a couple of months before the honest punter noticed there wasn't any software for them!

The main keyboard is a full-travel qwerty effort. The keys are a bit odd - slightly dish-shaped - and rather than rattling or springing back they produce a sort of dull clunk feel. Once you've got used to this it's actually no worse than most keyboads, and a lot better than some.

The two shift keys, shift lock, control, return and delete are in the standard positions, and are a darker brown than the main keys. You also get a caps lock on the left of the space bar (stupid place to put it) and a graphics shift on the right, which produces a range of block graphics - not marked on the keys, but documented in the manual.

Along the top of the keyboard, just below the screen, are a total of 13 oval shapes, about halfway between keys and buttons. The five on the right are the function keys, shiftable and programmable, giving you a total of ten. Function keys are generally labelled something like 1 to 10, but Casio in its wisdom has decided to call them PF0 to PF9.

The four cursor keys are next along - they're not organised as a cluster which, considering the amount of space the small screen leaves, is a wasted opportunity. Next along there's CLS/Home, Stop/Cont, Break and On. The On key simply switches the screen back on after it's timed out, which it does if you don't use it for around seven minutes.

The small size of the screen is curious. There's bags of space along the top of the machine, so there would theoretically have been no problem fitting a larger NEC/Tandy style display. As it is, the small 20 x 8 LCD looks a bit lost up there. A small wheel on the rear edge of the micro adjusts the display a little, but the design of the screen is such that it's comparatively difficult to read.

The NEC and Tandy machines, for example, have 40 x 8 displays, measuring 205mm by 55mm. The Casio's screen is slightly smaller than half this size, measuring 97mm by 41mm, and this makes a significant difference to the legibility of the individual dots in the letters.

Moving onto the resolution, we run across another oddity. The Casio's resolution is 160 x 64, while the NEC's is 256 x 64. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to work out that the Casio's horizontal resolution is a lot higher than half the NEC's, despite the Casio screen being less than half the length of the NEC's.

The next step is to look at the way the characters are defined on the screen. Normally one dot space between letters is regarded as sufficient to produce a reasonable image, but the Casio's characters are defined in such a way as to leave three spaces between each letter.

The overall effect of all this is to produce characters that are quite small, quite light, and a nuisance to read. The trade-off is of course that you get better graphics, because this is really what the display is geared to. But I'd say the price paid for the graphics capability is too high.

Still, with the aforementioned large quantity of space available at tht top of the case, it might be that Casio will consider putting in a larger screen.

The only software I saw for the machine was written by Eclectic Systems and distributed by Kuma. Deskmaster 2 is described in the manual as 'a powerful word processor', but powerful may apply more to the imagination of whoever wrote the manual. It needs so much memory that it'll only take around one and a half pages of prose, and it slows up the Casio's otherwise excellent screen handling. Basically it is to WordStar what Mickey Mouse is to Sir John Gielgud.

Peddling this little effort at £29.50 isn't likely to do either Kuma's or Casio's reputation a lot of good. At a more budget £9.95 you can also get Metric to Imperial Conversions, and there's also a Machine Code Support Pack and Deskmaster 17, which is a project analysis tool. I have yet to see the last two, and I'm confident I wouldn't have understood Deskmaster.

The poor quality of the Kuma software is all the more disappointing when you compare it with the quality of Casio's own CETL. I have my doubts about the chances of a lap portable which forces you to waste time loading a word processor from tape, and trust that Casio will eventually apply itself to producing a ROM-based machine.

The LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screen uses a matrix of segments to build up the characters - a similar principle to the cathode ray tube. However, each segment is physically addressed by a circuit. This contributes to the relatively high cost of flat screen technology.

The liquid crystal is sandwiched between two layers of polarising glass - the bottom layer has a silver backing to make it a mirror. As liquid crystal has the ability to rotate light as it passes through, the rotated light is not of the same orientation as that coming through the polarised front screen and can therefore be reflected back again. When a small current is applied to the crystal in the LCD, however, the light is not rotated and so isn't reflected back. Instead it's absorbed, producing the black effect which forms the characters.

Sliding back the large panel on the base of the machine reveals three expansion slots. These take neat little 8K RAM or ROM packs, bringing the total possible memory up to 32K. One of these is taken up by the CETL pack, but this still leaves you with a good supply of memory.

Round the back of the keyboard there's a standard Centronics port, cassette port and a 5 pin DIN RS232C. The main battery store is on the left of this, and slides out to reveal a socket for a disk interface. This is a neat example of necessity being the mother of invention, as you can't use the drive with the batteries. If you can't actually fit in the drive without being forced to plug in the mains adaptor, you can hardly make a mistake.

The review machine didn't come with a drive, but it sounds like it will be a revolutionary piece of technology. It would appear to be a 70K 5.25", so its main virtue's liable to be increased speed rather than storage capacity. In any event, no decision to import the drive to the UK has yet been taken, but it may turn out either to be too expensive to sell, or to be priced so low that there'd be no profit in it.

Casio also sells a four colour printer-plotter and a graphics printer along with what the Nipponspeak of the documentation refers to as the "Ten-keyboard", which plugs into an odd little DIN socket on the right hand side of the case. It's actually a numeric keypad rather than the ten keyboards you'd expect.

The FP-200 has two battery stores - the main one provides power for normal operation, and the back-up stores memory while the machine's switched off. Unusually, it uses ordinary non-rechargeable batteries for the latter. There's no low power indicator as such - the screen refusing to work is nature's way of telling you to put in new batteries, and in order to do so you have to save anything vital to tape before you replace the batteries, as anything in memory is lost.

Can you see the join in that one? If the screen won't work, how do you save things to tape? Fortunately, there's a mains adaptor, but it had me worried for a moment!

Besides this, the manual's actually a bit misleading on this. The main batteries do seem to operate when the machine's switched off, so it would appear to be safe to change the back-up batteries without using the mains adaptor.

The fairly standard Basic is pleasant to use, editing in particular having a couple of nice touches. Type EDIT and the first line of the program comes up for editing, and cursor left or cursor right moves you around one character at a time. But try to shift cursoft left or right and you'll move up and down through the program one line at a time.

The manuals lean heavily on the maths/data processing side of computing, but considering the machine's facilities this is a plus. Any work you do on it is liable to be geared to the Casio Easy Table Language, a sort of skeleton spreadsheet designed to be able to talk to Basic.

I'd better explain that. CETL is basically an empty, scrolling table whose size you define. There are only 16 one letter commands, so you can use it while referring to a single page of the quick reference guide. These 16 commands allow you to manipulate data or print it out with very little in the way of tears. Eat your heart out, Lotus...

Now a primitive spreadsheet's all very well, but what if you wish to perform calculations on your data? No problem, in the case of CETL. You insert a pointer to a program within your table, then any calculations you wish to make can be performed by a program entered in Basic mode. It's just a matter of switching between CETL and Basic modes at the relevant time.

So what you've actually got in the FP-200 is a highly flexible hand-held spreadsheet, and to use it to the full you'll want to knock up several programs to perform your own regular calculations. The programming examples in the operations manual are therefore liable to be of more interest to the average user than those that come with other handhelds.

The technical manual kicks off the Comms section with a useful explanation of what's going on and why. I found myself in severe danger of actually learning something. In order to transmit programs you use the form SAVE "COM0:",A. That's essentially the same syntax as saving to tape, which uses SAVE "CAS0:filename". The A in the transmit statement, incidentally, specifies ASCII format for the program being transmitted.

Program reception is dealt with by LOAD "COM0", and data transmission and reception uses the OPEN command followed by PRINT# or INPUT#... It all seems plain sailing, and the manual is highly commendable.

I've gone through a number of different stages while reviewing the FP-200. My initial reaction was that it was a nice cheap machine, but that the word processing software and the small screen let it down badly. But at that point I was really judging it by my own standards and needs rather than by its own standards. Some journalists inevitably mark down a lap portable if it doesn't have a proper word processor, and they'll tend to forget that not everyone actually needs a machine that will produce prose on the march.

Let's suppose you're in sales, you move around a lot, and you need to keep tabs on how stock's shifting. Suddently the FP-200 looks very attractive. You can manipulate figures easily, with a minimum of computing experience, and the processes involved are transparent enough for you to be able to pick up the computer knowledge you need to do it justice.

In a role of that sort the Casio would excel, but it still lacks flexibility. If Casio improved the screen and added a ROM word processor the FP-200 would be a real winner. As it is, it's a cheap and effective tool in its chosen market.