2008 Casio 830CA

More than a watch

It's the year 2008 #pastfuturetechnology.

If you grew up outside of Japan and the United States, you're probably only familiar with Casio as a watch brand (hello G-Shock and Classic!). For the early adopters of compact cameras, Casio might also ring a bell with its EXILIM brand. But in Japan and the US, they made excellent mobile phones for KDDI au, NTT Docomo, Softbank and Verizon.

I'll be covering quite a few more Casio phones from 2009 – 2013, but today we're taking a look at the Softbank 830CA.

This sleek, slim and functional handset is a low-mid range 3G device operating on a single W-CDMA frequency: 2100Mhz. That doesn't make it the best of travel companions in 2008, but that's perhaps a non-issue for its target market within Japan.

Fast forward to 2020 in Hong Kong, the device still works just fine on Smartone's 3G network with the use of a hyperSIM to bypass the Softbank network-lock.

The clean looking white and gold phone features a unique external LED display with fun animations, a low-resolution 3" FWQVGA (that's not a typo?) LCD screen of 240 x 427px, a no-frills 5Mpx camera, microSD extensions support, NFC Mobile Wallet (Osaifu and Suica) and 1Seg TV receiver.

Typical for NEC and Casio phones, Linux is the operating system of choice.

Looking at the software on this phone, the penguin animations on the homescreen are cute and engaging, and the phone has all the software bells-and-whistles one could think of.

Personally I wouldn't have bothered with it back in the day due to the terrible camera, but as an overall mid-range phone it's really quite alright.

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