My review, HP 35s Message #1 Posted by Elliott W Jackson on 8 Feb 2009, 10:53 a.m.
I recently picked up the new HP 35s, and have spent a week or so playing with it, and thought I would post my thoughts.
Background: I went through college from '80 to '84 for my engineering degree, in the heyday of the HP 41 series, and lived and died by that thing. My first was the HP41CV, and later I replaced it with the HP41CX. I had the card reader, the printer, and a couple of the ROM pacs. I had the books on Synthetic Programming, and the ROM for it. I subscribed to the various HP journals of the day.
This was back in the day when my wife and I didn't have 2 dimes to rub together, so all those things represented a signficant investment, and I was COMMITTED to that thing, both fiscally and emotionally, heh. I was an advocate, exchanging programs with my other equally-demented HP friends, and other users across the campus. I wrote dozens of programs for it as I progressed through my courses.
In recent years my old HP41 has been used less and less, as PC's, cell phones, and Blackberries/PDA's have replaced some of the functionality we used to crowbar into the calculator. But I still use it for lots of things, and when the keyboard began to misbehave a few years ago (the "1" key would sometimes register a 1, and sometimes not, making using it a bit exciting), I began to look around for a replacement.
This was around the early 2000's, and the models at the time just left me cold, I had no desire to purchase one. I have just been limping along with my occasionally-"1"-key-challenged HP41CX and making the best of it. However, I recently ran across the new HP 35s, and thought "aaahh, finally, HP is going back in the right direction!" and bought one. After a week of playing with it, I have a few thoughts to offer:
Positives:
- Love the old-style tactile keyboard
- the Equation Editor, and how it integrates with the Solver and the Integrator, is just great.
- the Solver is a huge addition from the HP41 days, wow, nice
- the Integrator is nice too
- the ability to handle complex and vector types natively, as single entries in storage memory or on the stack, is great
- the Linear Regression functions are nice and well done
- Like the Base conversions, although I'm still a bit confused about how to use them. I'll figure it out though.
Opportunities to Improve (see, I'm being kind in my language):
- I'd like to know who decided that "STO" should be a shifted key, and that "MODE" needed to be unshifted. That one just boggles my mind. Did the design team who came up with that actually have anyone on the team who uses these things? The MODE key allows you to switch between Degrees/Radians/Grads, and Algebraic/RPN modes. Here's a hint: I go between Degrees and Radians very infrequently, and when I do, it's a one-time thing I do at the beginning of a calculation sequence, not on the fly. I've never used Grads in my life, and I'll never use Algebraic mode. And even if I hated RPN and preferred Algebraic, my comment would be "I'll never use RPN mode", my point being, people are either one way or the other with ALG/RPN, they don't need to switch. The selector between ALG and RPN could be a toggle switch in the battery compartment, as frequently as it will ever be used. There is just nothing the MODE key does that merits it being a primary, unshifted key, particularly if it displaces some other function that should be unshifted, such as "STO". STO is a key I use constantly, on the fly, during calculation sequences, to stash some intermediate value for later recall and use, and the fact that it is shifted is just really irksome. If there is a glaring fault on the ergonomics of this calculator, this is it.
- Ok, I feel better now having gotten that out. But seriously...
- In this day and age, there really needs to be a USB connection capability, with the ability to move equations and programs back and forth between the PC. All my phones and PDA's have that, with robust connectivity options. Calculators have to step it up and make this a standard feature. Without some mechanism to store/retrieve programs, a programmable calculator is extremely hobbled - no "serious" software will ever be written for it.
- The "10^x" and "LOG" functions should probably go on one key, and likewise the "e^x" and "LN" functions. Right now those functions are actually on different keys (10^x / e^x are on one key, and LOG / LN are on another). I have no problem with them all being shifted, but since they are inverse functions they likely should go on the same key, like the trig functions. That one is not as big a deal as my STO/MODE rant above, but it does lead me back to the question of who was on the design team that thought that 10^x/e^x and LOG/LN went together, rather than e^x/LN and 10^x/LOG. Yes I understand that "textually" they look better the way they are, but mathematically it doesn't make sense. I don't use them that often, so when I need "LN" for example I go scanning and maybe I see "e^x" and think "ok, there's e^x so LN should be ... nope not there." Again, not that big a deal, more of an ergonomic zit.
- All the unit coversions built onto the keyboard really could have been in one of the menus. Every engineer will use some of them, but most won't use them all, and trying to guess which ones we'll all use is just a recipe for wasted keyboard real estate. Another ergonomic zit.
- the mechanism for indirect addressing is a bit clumsy, in that you have to use the I and/or J variables. I preferred the HP41 paradigm, where any register from 0-99 could be used as an indirect register.
- it would be really nice if you could both directly and indirectly access any register. The HP 35s allows you to indirectly access any register (A..Z, the statistics registers, and 0..800), but only allows direct access to the named A..Z registers.
Summary: While I've spent more time ranting about the negatives than the positives, I still like and recommend this calculator. It has some huge improvements over my old HP41's, and huge ergonomic improvements over the more recent HP calculators, in the keyboard if nothing else. My rant about the STO key is really more of a "but it could have been so much BETTER" comment, rather than a "this calculator is a step down" comment.
So, message to HP: You're doing the right things, you're going in the right direction again, and you've managed to stir the passions of this old calculator user at least. Now, get that STO key back on the unshifted keyboard, demote the MODE key to something shifted unless you have keyboard real estate to burn, and get a USB port in there. Fix the silly e^x/10^x LOG/LN layout if you get around to it, and consider demoting all those unit conversions to a menu somewhere.
Thanks,
Elliott
|