Buy Now or Wait for Revision B?

[cutterjohn]

(06-21-2014 05:02 PM)parisse Wrote:  Last time I checked, octave was *not* a CAS, it's numeric math. maxima is slightly slower than xcas (in my experience most of the time at least 5* slower), you can even test that on a Prime wrt a smartphone: try factor(x^202+x^101+1) for example. And of course the prime UI is much more advanced than the interface of maxima on android. If you don't know maxima, maxima on android is almost unusable, and even if you know maxima, it's not user-friendly.

takes c. 4s on a nexus 5 w/Maxima on Android
xcas pad take c. 3s on nexus 5
hp prime takes c. 2s

...and just for ----s and giggles
fx-cp400 takes about 6s

Time difference is essentially negligible as initial runs on android version were slower, probably a caching mechanism involved, than subsequent runs.

prime's only real advantage was that it was fairly consistent from first run to last, repeated each 5x.

Conversely there are examples that I have run into where maxima on android was several orders of magnitude quicker at solving symbolic and numeric problems. As I mentioned at the beginning of the quoted posts, it's the dedicated keys on most calcs that keep them handy for me, although with the removal of more and more dedicated keys in favor of clunky menus they're rapidly losing that advantage, e.g. in the case of the fx-cp400 I think that it has already passed deprecating too many dedicated keys in favor of clunky menus(and it's relatively slow).

As to usability: not really no. The command names are pretty similar between most CAS systems, and on the prime it's a matter of digging through clunky hacked up menus v. oh hmmm... PDF/search or web dox... personally I prefer the latter as EVERY touch screen calc that I've used so far mostly has some hack job of a touch UI that clunky as f'all, e.g. prime and even worse fx-cp400

As to octave: the very last thing that I would ever do is use ANY CAS for matrix operations, especially numerical. Octave does have optional symbolic support BTW.

nexus 5 is Android 4.4.3