HP Prime... NOT meant to replace HP48,49,50 ? Message #1 Posted by Chris Pem10 on 17 Nov 2013, 10:54 a.m.
I'm a long time HP48,49,50 user... started in 1991 with a 48SX... used them through Engineering school and still use 3 models today. Not trying to bash the new Prime; but I find it to be a truly frustrating experience trying to use it. I'll explain.
HP: you've stolen my variables. By restricting where I can use lower or upper case variables, you've DESTROYED my work-flow. Equations require a combination of upper and lower case variables... what were you thinking?
You've broken my ability to quickly do symbolic manipulation by removing RPN in the CAS. IT WAS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE THAT DEFINED HP AS DEFACTO STANDARD FOR SERIOUS ENGINEERING WORK. RPN eliminated calculator input errors ! The copy/paste method on the Prime, in short, sucks. Very inefficient compared to moving sub-expressions around on the stack, diving level 2 by level 1, or taking level 2 to level 1 power... etc. Very error-prone as well.
I'm guessing this machine is not meant to replace the 48,49,50? I honestly cannot recommend it to anyone wanting to solve engineering problems efficiently.
I LOVE the new screen. Anyone who has spent years staring at the 48,49,50 series welcomes this change. As for the touch screen ability: HP wasted the potential here. Use the machine for a day. Then look at your fingerprint smudges... it's a "heat map" of where you've interacted with the device. You'll see that you've only been using the bottom 25% of the screen. Why not utilize the rest of the screen with intuitive menu items, laid out in a grid pattern, covering the display? Cascading, drop-down menu items on a touch screen are, in my opinion, horrible. Can you think of a single iOS/Android app that uses that technique? None. For good reason. Just give me buttons. I promise to push them with my fingers !
Not trying to flame here... but have I simply made a mistake in thinking this machine is more than it really is? At this point I prefer my 2MHz, 64K HP 48 over this 400MHz 32/256M machine any day. The Prime causes PEBKAC that I just cannot overcome efficiently.
One last item... where in the flip did you put Euler's number "e" in the CAS output? Are we really going to have to look at "EXP(1)" in our equations? Dear God.
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