HP 49G Advantages over 49g+ & 50g

[cyrille de brébisson]

Hello,

The acronyms ERAM, IRAM and the like come from a long ago area where they refered to physical rams associated in various ways with the CPU. They kept beeing used, with the meaning sliding ever more with each calculator and have no real meaning in the later calculators.

The 48SX could had more "working" ram than any other saturn based calcs at 256+32KB. This made is the most memory powerfull calc of the series.
However, it's slow UI and slow CPU worked against it.

48GX was better thanks to a faster CPU (even if it lost 32KB of useable RAM) but the UI was still.... lacking.

The 49G Solved all that (with better software to balance the "bad" CPU), but lost the expandability :-( On the other hand it had a lot of flash storage so few people ever complained. And it had an atrocious keyboard.

The later, emulated series increased greatly on speed and added SD storage. But lost RS232 :-( They were definitely better from a "CPU" standpoint, but used more battery.

Appart from the lack of RS232, the latest 50G is definitely the best (once in RPN mode of course). Fast, with as much ram as the (virtual) Saturn could handle, OK enough keyboard + native programming.
My favorite is the HP 48GII which is the nicest looking of the lot (more professional/subdued than the black or golds). It was my personal color choise BTW :-)

Now, if course, HPPrime solves all these issues :-) but this is another product all together!

Cyrille