HP50g spins circles around the TI-89

[Sukiari]

(05-01-2015 01:00 AM)Marcio Wrote:  

(04-30-2015 05:59 AM)MarkHaysHarris777 Wrote:  I think the people at HP have made a tactical error in design and marketing where it comes to the 50g. I think they should have dumped the Prime, and reintroduced the 50g (50gc) with a color touch screen. The 50g is a better machine IMHO than the Prime, and the Prime is not competing well against the TI units (schools particularly).

It seems the Prime was their only alternative to compete against TI. Do you really think school kids would be able to use the 50g out of the box?

Simply tacking a color touch screen onto a half finished calculator isn't going to do it though. What was needed at the outset was the cooperation of the textbook publishing companies, who at this point assume that the student has a TI as do math teachers in a huge number of schools.

If the calculator was high quality (software and hardware) and offered capabilities beyond what TI already has, there will be a market. If not, there won't be. This is why I have said that the Prime's competition is Matlab, Maple, and Mathematica, not TI and Casio. The RPL system calcs were an ongoing, full featured, extremely useful tool and a successor needs to be indisputably better, not just faster and in color with a touch screen.