When will the next firmware release be?

[Jim Horn]

Good question! Microsoft?

Seriously, I know for a fact that HP does use alpha and beta testers well before they launch new calculators and have for years (I was an HP-75 user for a year before it was announced). I suspect a number of the Forum members have had that pleasure with other machines as well.

With the tremendous breadth and depth of functionality of even the simplest machines today, doing comprehensive testing over the range of valid and invalid inputs, output, interactions and such has become an astronomical task. A must-be-small set of testers is limited by requirements of expertise, tester time, security (to avoid pre-release), etc. You want testers that will put a machine through heavy and real-world use without ever showing it to anyone else, precluding its use on most jobs. You can't just hand them out to the most enthusiastic - how can they contain the excitement and not spill the beans?

Meanwhile, "Sooner or later you have to shoot the engineer and ship the product". Or, "The only enemy of good enough is more better". In other words, with the tremendous amount of code in these things (man decades) selling for a few hours pay versus the HP-35's man months of code selling for a month's pay, when does it become good enough to be worth having as compared to bug-free perfect? And if, in waiting for the latter, a competitor ships their apparently superior (but perhaps buggy) product, will the closing market window make it all for naught?

Let's keep things in perspective. This is the real world. Like the bird flapping with all its might to fly which wishes there was no air to fight against (but wouldn't go anywhere without it), we have to live with what is possible for the seriously limited *but still existing* resources that Tim, Cyrille and a remarkably few others have been able to use to make the remarkable products that bring us all here. Yes, mistakes are made. Yes, it is our implied duty and pleasure to find and report problems we encounter and we are fortunate that the above have been listening and responding to that.

But having watched HP Labs in Palo Alto spin off Advanced Products Division in Cupertino which spun off the Calculator Group in Corvallis which moved its calculator work to San Diego, Australia, Vancouver and Fort Collins (among other moves), sometimes eliminating it altogether, and considering the job it did with the Touchpad, later Jornadas and such - we're seriously lucky to have anything at all. To have something like the 39gII (designed for a market on the other side of the earth that doesn't include many or any of us), the re-engineered 15C, and, especially, the Prime with its gargantuan code and even larger future capability is so far beyond what anyone expected just a few years ago is staggering. Combining that with their open hardware (20b and 30b) leading to the astounding WP 3x series (bowing to that magnificent firmware / documentation / label / add-on team), I'm seriously impressed with what we have available.

Yes, I understand your frustration. But I just see the situation from a somewhat differing perspective...

(Not an HP employee - just (air)plane nuts...