Re: New design? 30s - + HP10BII Message #11 Posted by Glen Kilpatrick on 3 Oct 2002, 11:31 a.m., in response to message #9 by Vieira, Luiz C. (Brazil)
I had my hands on a 10Bii yesterday for a couple of hours. There are (the financial) five keys across the top, lower-left (ON) & upper-left & upper-right still clears continuous memory, but ON & next-to-upper-right produces a display & partial keyboard test. You then run from the upper-left key diagonally down and to the right, "bounce" off the right-most column of keys, and diagonally down and to the left 'til you hit the bottom row (like a check-mark rotated counterclockwise, and note that this tests every row and every column, but not every key). Anything other than this yields a FAIL. After you've reached the bottom row, the display starts cycling, and so far as I could tell, everything but for an ON is ignored. This test seems to be undocumented in the manual (I didn't have that much time to play), and no other ON & top-row keys appeared functional.
As to quality, it stank. The design is interesting, but the silver facing around the display, and around the five financial keys, and a smaller grouping on the second row, all this silver is uneven, evidence of cheap plastic with silver paint (contrast with former technology, where this would be a piece of metal with a sheen, and there would be no humps or valleys). And my brief foray around the keyboard showed significant misregistration. Where my fingers would report one key press, I once got a double digit in the display, but much more often had that key press ignored (the "1" key was particularly troublesome for being missed). If I had to SWAG, I'd say ~1% mistakes, certainly enough that you'd have to be watching the display for confirmation of whatever you were doing, but perhaps not enough to return it for another....
Let's hope that the New HP (rumored to be internal design only, construction subcontracted to China) does better.
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