Re: hp50g
Message #3 Posted by Larry Holmes on 18 July 2006, 4:49 a.m.,
in response to message #1 by LUIS
The front finish on the new HP-50G is not a finish at all, but is a textured surface cast into the plastic, as far as I can tell. The calculator is black plastic all around, which looks good, especially to HP fans who got used to various darker colors over the years. (The sudden introduction of the light blue 49G, the gold 49G+, and the silver 33s was such an aesthetic blow to those users that it almost killed them!)
The dark surface also required changing the colors of the shift keys and the legends above the other keys to match. I am very glad to see that happen! I have poor eyesight in one eye, and I am almost blind in the other eye. The current HP calculators are very hard to read.
The new HP-50g seems to be very close to the HP-49G+, with the addition of "nice" things like USB, and so forth. I don't know if the IR link is retained, though. The graphics quality may be better so they may have a better LCD with more pixels etc. The form factor (shape and size etc.) seem to be identical to the HP-49G+. I have not seen a price published anywhere, though. The only place I know is advertising the new model is HP-France, and I can only barely make out a little French: the words which are probably the ancestors of our American language, probably! I just realized that I did not think to try the "translate" option, if it is even available generally on the internet, like it is on, say, google pages. I will try that next time I look.
My guess is that the one thing which will "make or break" the new model in the eyes of people like the ones who hang around this site will be the keys and their "feel", the quality of materials and of construction. I feel that the keys on the newer version of the 49G+ have a fairly good feel after they are "broken in" a bit (I hope the use of the word "broken" here does not prove to be a literal description of their tendancies!). But the quality of the material, at least in the early models, was poor. If the quality of materials matched that of most older models, I would be very happy and would snap one up as soon as the usual first-unit feeding frenzy dies down.
I see the coming of this new calculator as being a lot like Christmas. What I wrote above is a partial reflection of "what I want for Christmas". Will "Santa" (HP) bring me what I want(good materials, some new functions, no bugs, even better display, maybe more speed, double-shot injected keys, a traditional keyboard with that wonderful "boink" feel, etc etc)? Or, will I get another klinker like the last few models have been. And perhaps like Christmas is for me, waiting for the new HP may almost be better than actually getting it.
Cheers, Larry
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