Slashdot Mirror
HP Releases New RPN Scientific Calculator
majid writes "HP just announced a new calculator, the HP 33S. It supports RPN and algebraic notation, and sports a funky V-shaped design. I don't think it looks as nice as the 33SII it is supposed to replace, and it seems to have rubber keys instead of the wonderful hard plastic keys on older HP calculators, but it's nice to have a new RPN scientific calculator that does not have the intimidating learning (and remembering) curve of the 48 or 49 series. This one just might join my trusty 15C ...
The User's manual PDF is available courtesy of Amazon, where it is apparently already No. 85 on the best-selling list."
Really, why bother, the dedicated calculator is dead. Just install EasyCalc and EasyStat which can do some pretty neat stuff for your Palm and you're all set. My Tungsten T3 has a 144Mhz ARM CPU, which is loads faster than anything dedicated calculators can offer and has a beautiful 320x480 16bit tft.
Plus there are loads of software for Palms that can do statistics, etc..
Too bad HP can't see it. Or maybe they can and they want to rip you off? After all, if you buy a Palm, all you have to do it upgrade your software to get new features. With this, you need to buy a new calc.
Talk about a rip-off if I ever saw one.
Try using a stupid stylus during a calculus final, or during an engineering project...
No, for 'real' usage, you cant replace a real calculator with a flat emulation of one.
That said i do have a RPN emulator for my Toshiba 330, but still, when i have to do more then just a quick calculation, its back to my HP48. ( or 41, that got me thru college.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The US Internet Price is $49.99
... sit down ... $112.61
... no - wait ...
The campus bookstore at my college (DTU Denmark) charges
Granted, Denmark has a 25% sales tax. Let's add that and compare: $49.99 * 1.25 = $62.49
I believe the words I'm looking for are "HOLY FUCKING SHIT!"
Good thing I'm not a poor pennyless student
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
HP makes the best calculators by far. I love RPN. The stack is a wonderful computation tool (in fact I'm making an RPN calculator for PalmOS if anyone is interested in helping). Unfortunately, with every new calculator from HP, they continue making the same mistake. They need to improve the hardware. I don't know if anyone has tried symbolic integration on an HP. It's like those coffee commercials. Walk the dog, check the calculator, learn Dutch, check the calculator. The HP49g+ still runs on a 4 bit bus. What's the deal with that. This new calculator is an improvement, using the 6502 processor, but still. There are a lot better processors that are cheap enough. This is why HP can't beat out TI in the calculator industry. TI's interface isn't nearly as good as that of the HP, but TI can actually perform calculations in a reasonable amount of time. Symbolic computation is actually feasible with a TI. Come on HP, give us some power!
Full out graphing calculators are of no use to me as a student really. For doing calculations, this is dandy. If I need to do graphing or stats work, then I use the $1000 calculator with a 21" screen right in front of me.
This is just what the doctor ordered for me really. I've been looking for a sub $100 RPN without graphing, and now I've found it.
-Reid
Tetris was nasty on the TI-83... I didn't have the link cable so I used the built-in language to program tetris. It couldn't process loops fast enough, so I had to manually unroll all the loops. Nothing like 100 'if' statements in a row on a tiny non-qwerty keyboard to give you carpel tunnel.
I still miss my HP 42s. I replaced my stolen 42s with with a 48GX but while the 48gx does everything that the 42s did (and more) I still like the smaller form factor on the 42s.
I've seen 'em for sale on e-bay but I don't feel like paying $250.00usd just to get one back, expecially since the only thing I use a calculator for anymore is balancing my checkbook.
The 42s had a lot going for it - I think HP would do well to re-release it, or at least make a new version.
That thing is painful to look at and resembles something out of my kid's Transformers collection. What's wrong with rectangular keys and straight columns and rows other than Marketing doesn't think that's 'cool' enough? On the plus side, it has a "last x" key. The 48GX doesn't have one and I miss it.
Looks like the golden oldies are still top of the line. It's amazing that over 10 years old calculator still beats the living daylights out of these new toys. HP calculator division should take more note about their roots... if you can't design a worthy successor, heck, at least put out a slightly modernified (more memory, higher clockspeed) version of 48GX.
Not that this is even meant to be a competitor for 40>, it's supposed to be few steps below, and the reason for "easy learning curve" is obvious, it just does so much less, but still... it's hard to know if those keys are as bad as they look, but apparently they are if fellow posters are correct, and the display sucks as well (in addition to being way too small for lots of things).
Looks like you still need to pry my 48GX from my cold, dead hands.
The big advantage my old trusty 15C has for me is dedicated A-F keys for doing hex math. This new HP suffers the same problem that the 48SX/GX has: you need to do the friggin' "Alpha shift" key before every hex digit.
No thanks man... if it doesn't have dedicated A-F keys it ain't no programmers calculator.
--Rob
Reminds me of a physics professor who used to give us difficult quantum mechanics problems. When we'd start crunching it out by hand he'd say, `if only the school had $2,000 dollar calculators we could use.' That was our clue that MathCAD or Mathematica was needed to get the job done.
-Colin
Wait a freaking minute: this thing runs on a 6502? Does this mean, the 6502 lives on in an actual product designed and implemented in the 21st century?
As a Commodore 64 fan, I can only rejoyce at this.
Where can I find any further info on the hardware architecture of this calculator?
Sigged!
I understand the syntax of RPN, but I never did enough math to understand why it is so useful. Are there some
examples anyone can give me that show its advantages?
Thanks,
-Jeff
Count your stars lucky.... At least HP still manufactures decent calculators. It's not that far a stretch to see HP take their calculators down the road of so many of their other products like their printers, which used to be sooooo good.
Here's a plausible scenario:
Imagine having to first activate the calculator via a Windows software install. This would, of course, require an Internet connection, so that the latest firmware (2.45, of course, to fix recent problems with totals) could be downloaded to the calc. The firmware, by the by, is 12.85 megabytes. (Well, not _really_ but there's other stuff in there, too, of course.) No Internet? No activation. No calcy.
Oh, and you must register the product, otherwise you won't receive support or updates. And while installing, Share-to-Web, BackWeb, and five other processes will be installed. They'll come up with the next reboot. (That explains the extra 50 seconds added to reboot, anyway.)
*sigh*
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Actually - you *can* do PDEs on an HP48, if you've got the right software (either program it yourself or download it off the 'net.)
Fact of the matter is that *nothing* I have seen as of yet can help you solve problems faster, in a classroom or work environment, than an HP48 series calculator (I've got the 48GX and it was worth every penny I paid for it when I was a student.)
It *is* true that it can't do everything. However, I found it to be most useful when solving tedious but easy problems (such as figuring out partial fractional expansion when solving Laplace Transform-type problems.) Need to find coefficients or roots (no matter how complex - with both regular and imaginary numbers, in large matrices, etc. etc...)? The HP can do it for you.
Of course, you *still* have to think - does the answer that the calculator spit out make any *sense*?
Post Versalog. Ooops, am I giving away my age?
Nope, you're not. I have a slide rule (Versalog, AFAIK), and I'm only fourteen! Of course, I can't do much more than simple multiplication (since I have an hp49g+, a TI-89, and just got rid of my TI-83+), but I can still say I have it.
-MrM
Why is that not the calculator's fault? Whose fault is it then?
TI is generally bad news. My roommate and I found a bug that kills all your memory and TI told us that they wouldn't fix it. "Don't press those buttons" is what they told us.
I'm going for an HP when I next need a calculator (our school required TI-89s, but frankly I get more and more fed up with their idiocy every day. They're great for high schoolers, but for people doing real math, I think HP wins.)
My other car is first.
RPN is dead to me. Well, almost.
I have a HP 16C and there has never been a more useful tool for the working programmer. Apart from the obvious number system conversions (unshifted A-F keys, joy!) it does any logical or arithmetic operation you might be considering on a real-world CPU. Bored on the plane? Take "Hacker's Delight" and a 16C and you're set. I wouldn't get rid of it and since RPN is like riding a bike, keeping it around while using a Texas Instruments machine isn't going to be hard.
But HP are in decline. Yet another ho-hum calculator in cheap plastic with mushy keys - gosh, thanks Carly. But after the last modern HP calculator I bought died after a week I'm not giving you any more of my money. Instead I'll have a Ti 84 Plus, or perhaps a Ti 89 Titanium. That HP has no fucking clue should be obvious from the 49G+ alone - how is it even possible to make a machine with that clock speed work so slow? I believe RPN is better - but I expect HP to drop calculators completely just as soon as that division has a couple of bad quarters.
What's so great about the 33S?
(FS: HP 42S, two-line display RPN scientific, like new, with box & manuals. $$$ offers?)
For me, the most important reason I like RPN is that I don't have to save intermediate results and recall them later. They are pushed onto the stack. This turns out to be a much more intuitive and easy way to evaluate large expressions. You don't have to remember that you saved the 1st and 4th parts of the numerator in memory slots 1 and 2 and that the two parts of the denominator are in slots 3 and 4. If you don't ever need to evaluate complicated expressions RPN might not be that much of an advantage to you.
-Dan