30b discontinued?

[Howard Owen]

(01-15-2014 03:52 AM)RMollov Wrote:  Interesting point Would you mind speculating a bit more on that?

There's not a lot of material to speculate on. Firstly, they might not be retiring the 30B after all. Given the assumption they are, they might decide the niche they were after with the 30B is not worth filling. Finally, if both of those assumptions break the right way, the only clue I can see to any possible follow on calculator is the feature set of the 30B. The 30B has a rather unusual combination of business and math functionality. It's also dead cheap. My guess is that fact that you can flash it may not be a big factor in product plans for that particular niche.

On the other hand, the wish lists of this community have often shown up in HP products before now. The 15CLE is a prime (ahem) example. But we've also seen keyboard improvements, default RPN modes, large enter keys on the left and a public SDK for designing new calculators on top of an inexpensive, reflashable machine. It may not be entirely due to sympathetic engineer's desires.* This community is small, but influential. We tend to be evangelists for the traditional style of HP calculator. That makes us a marketing resource for HP in a social network sort of way. If we all joined Facebook we could amplify our influence and get more freebies. (I'm ducking my head in anticipation of outraged responses to that idea.

* That's not to say that the same persons may not be sympathetic to our interests and smart enough to see the marketing advantage in our advocacy.