Your First Handheld?

[Matt Agajanian]

(05-11-2014 08:41 PM)Mike Morrow Wrote:  

(05-10-2014 11:22 PM)Dale Reed Wrote:  Dad had a TI SR-50 for work -- that was a sweet looking machine, and I never did like the black-and-gold style of the later TI calculators (SR-51A, TI-59) etc. as much as the blue/silver theme of the original SR-50.

That's exactly what I thought. After buying a SR-50 in 1974, I bought a SR-51A a year later. That was a much more versatile machine, but I hated the clunky color scheme and other aspects of TI's industrial design for the SR-51A and all later TI machines. I suspect that some of that gang must have gone over to HP by the mid-1980's, judging from how terrible the industrial design of the HP 28C/S, -38G, -48all, and Pioneers were, not least the colors chosen for case and keyboard, and that awful awful clamshell design.

Having both 28s (no pun intended) (C and S), my pet peeve of bad design is/was the battery compartment. It did and does lead to some very frustrating battery changing routines, not to mention the awkward choice of N cell necessity. PS-NEVER, NEVER make the mistake of putting in A23/23A sized cells in--thus another reason I find the battery choice for this clamshell lineage a bad move from HP.