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Hardware

HP Plans The Uber-Calculator 194

Posted by Hemos from the computing-you-i-will-be dept.
Compenguin writes "Over at TiCalc.Org information has leaked out about the new HP Xpander. Reported specs: 133MHz RISC processor (downclocked to 66 for power consumption), 320x200 screen 256 shades of gray, MP3 playing capabilities, and a "futuristic look." There is also a rumour flying around that it might run Pocket Linux as its OS. " Check out HP's page as well - and see our prior post on the 49G, the parent to this model.
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HP Plans the Ubser-Calculator More

HP Plans the Ubser-Calculator

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  • I wanna see a ZSHELL or USGARD menu screen w/ "Linux" or "bash" as a menu option ;)

    da w00t.
  • It's probably been said already but I'll say it again:

    Batteries, Batteries, Batteries!

    Running a fast CPU takes quite a bit of energy, and nobody is going to want a calculator that uses up four AAA batteries in 4 hours.

    Another reason is that those old CPUs are quite cheap AND small. Put a 68060 (32bit, much faster) instead of a 68000 in a TI-89 and it'll probably cost a bit more than $140.

    Of course, those old calculators probably weren't running 0.18 micron versions of those old CPUs; if they were, they'd probably be running at 66MHz as well.

    -- Sig (120 chars) --
    Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
  • TI already has translucent cases for their calculators. You can buy them for $4 each (or $16 for the set of 5, IIRC) from TI's web site.
  • TI-89 isn't allowed on the ACT, though. I almost found out the hard way. Good thing I bought an 86 instead.

  • Anyone that actually knows what the hell is going on in calculus class can probably integrate faster by hand than with a calculator.

    If you want numerical integration the calculator comes closer to winning, but only on really tough calulus problems. For undergrad math courses the most powerful calculator that anyone should use is a scientific. Graphing calculators may help people get the right answer, but it doesn't make them any smarter. It just lowers the bar for academic achievement. (Then again, that seems to be what achievement is lately, finding new ways to lower the standards.)

  • When i got my hp 48G (7-8 years ago) i spent many hours of class playing the built in mine sweeper. if they want to put an mp3 player in something that i could have convinced my parents that i needed, i'm all for that.

  • Jesus H. Kee-rist, that's just the thing you need here in the year-2000 United States of Amerika, our new police state. Absolutely perfect to get your ass shot [concentric.net].

    Someday I should tell you about the day a lady copy pulled a gun on me because she saw I had a ninety-glass [allenprecision.com] in a case hanging from my belt.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net


  • Even worse than the piss poor keys on the HP49, is the fact that virtually none of the keys *do* anything directly. It's the same problem that the TI89/92 have: lots of power, but you have to go through 4 menus to do get to it. The HP48GX on the other hand, has lots of keys which directly access functions. Two key strokes and the entire stack of complex numbers is converted from rectagular to polar, and vice versa.

    I did a direct comparison with my girlfriend. She had a TI89 and I had an HP48GX. To enter a matrix into her calculator and perform a couple simple operations, took about 20 more key strokes than my mine.

  • yes, but sometimes it takes *all* of the calculus functionality of my hp 48G to balance my checkbook.
  • I'm seeing a lot of posts along the lines of what's the point 133mhz calculator or is it a calculator or a PDA. In truth it sounds more like a PDA than a calculator. So why not get a PDA in stead?

    Many reasons

    1. Interface

    The Palms interface is optimised for use as an organisor, not a handy interface to use in a 3-hour math exam.

    2. Software

    I am probably among a select few people in that I know almost all of the HP48's fuctions (and used them for usefull purposes in my engineering classes). The HPs software is easly worth the cost of the calculator, now with the 49G and more symbolic stuff this is even more true. Would you want to load your MathCAD, Maple and Mathlab on you palm.

    Why do I want this? I see this as being an all purpose data collector and field analysis tool. For me to do some field work requires both a calculator and a laptop. A PDA optimised for engineering use would kill two birds with one stone. Right know I thinking I could port or program specialized engineer software to it and be able to design revisions quickly and accurately in the field. Another use for this device is a data collector (ala survey total stations and GPS) the HP48GX is still a industry standard in this deparment but is getting too old and slow to be used in new inovations, like real time GIS data while you survey.

    Just my two cents worth.

  • Well, I can and do program my HP48GX right from the keyboard. (I wrote a simple little program just this morning while in the field.) And I have a LISP interpreter and also a copy of Turbo C v.2.0 (which I bought back in 1989!) on my HP200LX. Can you write any program at all for use on a Palm Pilot, no matter how trivial, on the Palm Pilot itself? Can you write a program for Windows CE on a Windows CE machine? No, you need a cross-compiler or something like that (and a damn costly one too) running on another real computer. Yeah, wow, a Palm Pilot or a WinCE PDA have processors that can run circles around the 80186 in my HP200LX, but you can't program it on itself, so as far as I am concerned my HP200LX still blows away any PDA currently shipping.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • OT, but...

    The Avigo was positioned to try and dethrone the PalmPilot (not the Palm III, V, or VII, mind you -- just the PalmPilot). Although it had some decent features, TI effectively killed its appeal to the geek set by announcing that there would be no third-party anything. That's right -- you couldn't develop any hardware or software for it, and there were no provisions to install new software at all. TI is a very control-freakish company. You can't even link your calculator to a PC without buying a ~$40 link cable, or building your own for about $5 in parts.

    Compare this to the original Pilot, which had dozens of applications coded in gcc and other free tools before the official Windows SDK was even released.

    Of course, what makes this thread most off-topic is the fact that this calculator that was just announced is made by HP, not TI.

  • Guess HP's gone downhill. I ran my HP41 over with a Chevy Suburban (yeah it was lying in soft sand, but still, a Suburban) and a while later dropped it in eighteen inches of water and it still is running, fifteen-plus years after I bought it.

    I sure hope the HP48GX is made of stronger stuff than that 49 the top poster was complaining about, because I take it in the field daily to do land surveying, and we surveyors just destroy equipment, it comes with the territory. On the other hand, if it breaks it's not all that bad, because unlike my old 41, that 48GX is the company's property, not my own personal purchase.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • I can't believe they changed the styling to look so bad. I'm an engineer, not an art student, so why should my calculator look like a work of art. Give me something square, durable, RPN or give me death!

    I'm not giving my 48G up any time soon... no matter how "underpowered" it is.
  • I bought a HP 49G some months ago, and as you say, it isn't very useful. I haven't touched it yet (sticking to a very old but handy small HP calculator, I do need RPM), it's just to big and complicated.

  • Good God this is wonderful! Is it stable? I take back the negative things I said elsewhere about Palms. In fact, I think I'll go shopping and check out some prices. Now if I can only find a Palm-compatible PDA which accepts compact flash memory cards, so I can store a decent amount of data in there... Thank you for posting this!

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • I knew a guy who worked at HP's terminal division about 20 years ago. They developed a "terminal" that ran Basic, had several processors (a 68k and some 8088, if I remember) cassette drives and maybe even a floppy. I think it also had color graphics capability. The small computer division got wind of it and had it killed on the grounds that was encroaching on their territory.
  • 1394 ("firewire") and 809.2 over RF (wireless ethernet). At least I wish. Seriously, I remember the HP48GX taking expansion cards, if they move to the PC-Card interface with mobile Linux, and you plop TCP on it . . . You wanna see distributed.net [distributed.net] REALLY take off?

    And the teachers thought they had it bad when they made us put electrical tape over our IR ports . . .

  • What is this thing you call a "calculator" and what might one use it for?

    Is this the name for the next generation PDA's, this "calculator"?

    --

  • A search on PalmGear [palmgear.com] returns 260 matches for "calculator." This includes several RPN calculators, MathPad [palmgear.com] for evaluating many equations simultaneously (GREAT for Physics work) and even a powerful graphing calculator [palmgear.com]. Some of these tools aren't free, but for a professional they might just be worth the price.
  • I hope that HP gets their act together before releasing the new calculator because, overall, the quality of the HP49 is lousy IMHO. I've owned a 49 since the initial release and after several ROM updates and multiple exchanges of the hardware under warranty, I feel like I paid $180 to beta test their product.
  • I think the issue is probably money. A color screen would cost a good bit more than a b&w screen wouldn't it? If they sprung for color they might have to leave out the ability to play MP3s or something to keep the price tolerable. *GASP* Heaven forbid we trade entertainment for productivity!

  • Let me guess - the futuristic look is a big red and white plastic box, kind of like an ice chest.

    Oh, wait - that is an ice chest. For overclockers to carry it around in.

    --
  • There's nothing worse than sitting in an exam and finding a complex integration taking 10 seconds+ to carry out. If i'd bothered to learn stuff I could probably get the questions done almost as fast doing them myself.
  • I've noticed a downward turn in calculator interfaces lately. My TI-85 was great, but when TI put out the 89, they decided to replace it with the slow, klunky menu interface from the 92. Sometimes, making a calculator work more like a computer isn't the best thing to do. Why should I need to [F1] [8] [Clear] to clear the home screen and entry line when I used to be able to do it in one button press, and when I did that, the screen cleared faster.

  • So as though the NYT weren't enough, Thomas Friedman has a /. account now! But the Polish working class want their pensions and health care system back! youse dirty capitalist &^%$#.

    Yours red Willy - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • How about a Handspring Visor?

    *Hardware expansion bus: Springboard -- Supports software & hardware on single low-profile card, expansion of system memory, external I/O, etc.
    *Programmability: Okay, Palm OS really isn't the best development platform in the world...something better than C for rapid development would be really nice. There are C, Lisp, and minimal Java compilers, all available free or cheaply now, though.
    *CPU power: You know, the Dragonball chips really aren't that bad...the original Mac, every PC up to the 386's, and even a lot of early workstations (like the old Moto-powered Suns) has slower chips, and were perfectly seviceable for all kinds of scientific apps.
    *Display: Probably the weakest link. 4-bit grayscale at 160x160 ain't gonna cut it for complex graphs, or anything 3-D.
    *Interface: USB. Fast as 10/Base-T Ethernet, cheap, and low-power.

    If all those are a little anemic for what you want, why not take a step back in time to the later Newtons? You lose a good bit in portability, but gain a 100+ MHz StrongARM processor, much better display, handwriting recognition, and an actual PCMCIA slot. I'm not familiar with how easy the Newton OS is to develop for, but it seems like it should be no worse than for the Mac.
  • Hmmm, this could be the beginning of something interesting...

    Okay, first, you'd likely want keys on your "LinuxCalc" for things like mv, cat, grep, cut, and of course for things like | and <. Lotsa keys, just like any decent HP calculator. (I still LOVE my 11C! - it still works, and it's 15 years old!)

    Okay, so, you'd type:

    file1<enter>file2<enter><mv_key> for RPN. Simple!

    For pipelining, you'd probably have to go backwards:

    -d:<enter>-f7<enter><cut_key><|_key>fascdot<ente r><grep_k ey><|_key>/etc/passwd<enter><cat_key>

    I think. The pipelining one is hard, to be sure...you might need a special key to prevent it from calculating those first steps immediately. Of course, maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing. Have it pipe the current value to something else. Certainly RPN would make for an interesting UI...someone up to modifying Bash? :)

    ps That was a pain in the ass to correctly enter all those html codes for the < & > marks. I hope you all appreciate that. ;) Shouldn't "Plain Old Text" _mean_ "Plain Old Text?"
  • RPN is superior to the "normal" way (does it even have a name?). Yes, it does. The "normal" way is called infix notation. RPN is Postfix notation, and a posibility exists to do prefix notation, but we just pretend that doesn't exist.
  • Be careful with the TI-92. It can do symbolic algebra, and has a full QWERTY keyboard.

    Some places and school will disallow a calculator that has either of the two above traits. You may not be able to use a TI-92 in a calc class, nor can you use it on the SATs. Ask your math department about approved calculators.

    These calculators are expensive, so plan ahead. I bought my TI-82 in 1996 during high school and was able to use it all the way through college math.
  • Actually, you can program on the Palm Pilot...
    On Board C
    http://www.individeo.net/OnBoardC.html
    Hot Paw Basic
    http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/hotpaw/
    And about 8 more listed on this site:
    http://www.wademan.com/Pilot/Program/FAQ.htm#OnP ilot
  • It's a conspiracy to drive up the sales of batteries. My 48G goes through enough AAAs just acting as a remote control for Winamp.
  • ps That was a pain in the ass to correctly enter all those html codes for the marks. I hope you all appreciate that. ;) Shouldn't "Plain Old Text" _mean_ "Plain Old Text?"


    FYI, there's a bug in slashdot where if you select "plain old text", it thinks you want "extrans" and vice versa.

    Normaly, I'm not much of a complainer, but this bug has gone unrepaired for at least 3-4 months, maybe longer.

    I'm surprised that any self-respecting programer would let a bug as glaringly noticable go unrepaired as long as this one has. We know that nothing's perfect and that these things take time, but fix it allready! ;)
  • The Lambda operator and the executable blocks are what you're thinking. It allows you to put a normally executable operator on the stack instead: (lambda) ls (lambda) > (lambda) | |

  • WHY? (Score:3)

    by Vanders ( 110092 ) on Monday August 07, 2000 @04:25AM (#873591) Homepage
    Why the hell would i want my Calculator to play MP3's? Geez, there's convergance, and then theres convergance.
  • Um, the HP49 has had a translucent case before TI even considered the idea.

    Not that it matters.

    Jeremy

  • mmm...tasty. (Score:5)

    by heatdeath ( 217147 ) on Monday August 07, 2000 @04:27AM (#873593)
    Aw yeah. That'll be one sweet calculator. If I combine this and my fashionable pocket protectors, I'll be the perfect chick repellant.


    --
  • My first calculator was an HP-25. In fact, I learned programming on it. RPN is superior to the "normal" way (does it even have a name?).

    I wrote a cool Fibonacci generator on the HP-25. First you seed the stack with a 0 and a 1. The program is

    01 - Push
    02 - Push
    03 - Pop
    04 - Pop
    05 - +
    06 - Goto 01
  • Check out [hp.com] the stats on HPs 49G. It has the option to display in 'textbook mode', much like the TI-89/92. Of course the advantage will always be to the company who has access to (and uses) the latest greatest technology.
  • This is a great product. If you've ever seen the communities that have sprung up over Ti's 8x line, then you'll know what uses these things have been put to. There are people that write custom OSs for TI's calculators (around 8-10 MHz on 32-128 KB of RAM.) People figure out how to make the thing generate sound through the serial port, how to overclock it, how to make it drive a radio, how to write custom assembly for it, all kinds of neat things. It brings a hackerish feeling that you really don't get these days. Programming the TIs is like programming those old computers. You get to program directly to the hardware, you have to come up with tricks to get the thing to do what you want, you have to find nifty uses for the built in hardware. That's real hacking. What really makes them so popular is that they're cheap and flexible. I really hope that HP manages to keep the price of this thing under $150, or else it really won't work. There are already other HPCs on the market, and this product needs to be different. Since it addresses the main problems with TI's series (poor screen resolution, slow screen response, and limited CPU power) this product could really be cool if priced appropriatly.
  • Found this link on the discussion about the new Palm VIIx. This is one bad ass piece of hardware. How's a Pilot with a 1GB microdrive do you for storage? : ) TRG Pro [trgpro.com]

  • Reverse Polish Notation? (Score:3)

    by abischof ( 255 ) <alex&spamcop,net> on Monday August 07, 2000 @04:27AM (#873598) Homepage
    What I want to know is -- will this still use Reverse Polish Notation, like the rest of the HP Calc family? While I don't have anything against RPN in priciple, I never could quite get used to it... (then again, I've never actually owned an HP calc, this was just from trying friends' calcs)

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • Modern calculators have been seriously overpowered. Look at the 48GX/49G - a 4 mHz Saturn processor. The TI 82/83/85/86? A Z80! The ever-powerful 89/92? Equivalent to a 1984 Macintosh! It's time to see them play catchup with other modern technologies like PDA's.

    I've been interested in putting Linux on an ultra-portable device like this, and if this does run Mobile Linux (and if it doesn't, it will in short order) then it's time for some ultra-portable nethack playing! Woohoo!

  • Re:Aren't any of you people Engineers (Score:3)

    by Tassach ( 137772 ) on Monday August 07, 2000 @07:48AM (#873600)
    I think you hit the nail right on the head. The problem with the Palm and it's ilk is that they are optimized for the needs of managers and salescritters, not engineers. While smaller than the general business market, I think that engineers make up a big enough market niche to make a specialized engineering PDA a profitable venture.

    An engineering PDA would need to have a good expansion interface (PCMCIA, perhaps) so that you can add whatever data acquisition / capture device your particular flavor of engineering requires, the CPU power & programability to manipulate & analyze the data you've captured, a display to visualize it, and a fast interface to upload it all to a real computer.


    "The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

  • Great!! Now I can listen to mp3s in lecture in addition to playing Tetris!
  • Hmm... my 92 seems very underpowered. It's simply a matter of the fact that the "neat things" - 3D graphing, equation solving, etc. take up more CPU than current calculators provide.
  • I would think that it would be far more useful to use those shades of grey for antialiasing purposes, so that the curves on your graph would look smoother. It could mean easier to read fonts, too.
  • Are you crazy? The license for Mathematica alone will push these calculators well over the $1,000 price point.
  • ... if it's cheap enough that I can replace my HP48G without ruining myself completely :) The 48G is still sweet after all this time.. I certainly hope the Xpander will be usable as a remote control as well :)

    HP has a history about being way more hacker-friendly than the other calculator manufacturers regarding software and packaging - including a serial connector cable/PC software instead of selling it separately, making sweet stuff like compilers available, using established transfer protocols instead of proprietary, and of course the lovely RPN.. All for a reasonably low price.

    If they can keep up with their previous cost-to-coolness ratio, I'm definitely going to buy one. Otherwise I'll probably have troubles resisting my urge to nick one ;)
    --

  • Calculators (Score:4)

    by troc ( 3606 ) <troc@ma[ ]om ['c.c' in gap]> on Monday August 07, 2000 @04:49AM (#873606) Homepage Journal
    I've often been tempted by a new calculator, one of the Casio or TI graphical ones would be nice, so would a monster from HP. All that processing power.........

    Problem is I've found that in the real world outside of things like Physics degrees and whatnot these extra functions seem unnecessary. I've a laptop and access to a huge SGI mainframe if I need to do serious and/or graphical calculations and for the rest I find my Casio fx-991 (circa 1987 I guess) still works perfectly. Solar Powered too.

    Maybe I'm a luddite or maybe I don't see the point (equally, there might be people out there who need a pocket-sized calculator that can play MP3s, runs linux etc etc). I guess if it was my only machine but I don;t want to carry around a PDA and a heavy calculator. Might as well carry my laptop and get better functionality, more mp3 storage, decent games and a useful screen for graphical work.

    Convergence like this is odd because what's happening is that everything is tending to become the same. Computers, taht can do everything are slowly shrinking and becoming more easily portable (longer battery life, lighter, better screens etc) whilst PDAs and palmtops are gaining faster processors and the ability to do decent maths, play mp3s etc. Now calculators are heading in the same direction but from a different tack. So eventually we end up with the same thing.

    I also find it annoying to carry around a multiplicity of items, It's bad enough with a mobile phone and a laptop (which I need to carry for my job). I can't be hassled carrying a pda and a calculator, especially when the start duplicating functions. I'd end up spending every night synch-ing everything to make sure the one mp3 I was desperate to listen to was on everything, just in case I lost or forgot the one gadget it was on. Nightmare!

    I want one device that has everything I need on it and is easy and simple to back up in the evenings. Yes, I'd probably use lots of the cool functions on a new HP calculator and I like RPN but I've Mathematica, fortran amd others, not to mention all sorts of modelling and fem packages available on my laptop.

    I'll shut up now :)

    troc
  • My Palm Pilot calculator does math, trig, financial (TVM), logic, statistics, as well as time, weight, length, area, temperature, volume, power/energy and currency conversions. Try to integrate on your HP/Ti calc.
  • Ok, it's funny...

    But you can really redirect a Linux console to the HP48!

    [tudelft.nl]
    Check it out...
    From the URL:
    Here it is: a fast and very complete terminal emulator for HP48 with a lot of features! Intended as terminal for a Linux system, but useful for other purposes as well.

    It works like a charm...I am even able to connect my HP48GX to my Garmin GPS II+ (with other software of course)...:-)

    Yours

    Michael
  • I was recently in a Financial Management class where students were suggested to get the BA II+ financial calculator. However, already having a Visor, I decided I wanted to get something for that instead of having to spend the extra money on a piece of plastic and silicon I would use for only one semester then probably never again.

    I found powerOne Finance, and I liked it so much--well, I didn't buy the company, but I did write a review of the program [themestream.com] on Themestream explaining what it does, how to use it, and how it helped me so much in that class.

    85-90% of the problems in that class involved Time Value of Money, and powerOne's TVM worksheet put me one up on all the people who had to enter one line at a time into those stinky little business calculators. Worked great!
    --

  • Oh well, at least I'll be able to use my 89 on standardized tests like the APs and SATs (I'm a high schooler). I doubt they'd let you get away with and MP3 playing monster of a calculator on those tests. That won't stop me from getting one, of course (unless TI comes out with a similar product).
  • Geez. With that sweet 256-grey scale graphical equalizer and plugins...and about 100 keys to control the volumes, song to play, etc.

    I can't see why I'd get any other MP3 player, ever.
  • quite true!
  • They should never have changed beauty and truth quarks to bottom and top. I think they lost their charm.

    Except then you get someone in there who believes that beauty is truth (and thus, truth is beauty) and the next thing you know there's a singularity in your accelerator. (Not that that would be a bad thing, but...)

    Of course, if you've ever seen a physicist at 5am, you'll know that truth is definitely not beauty.

  • sure it has more power that most people need but its the geek factor. imagine being in math class and your friend is on his/her "pretty print" display and you turn and say "check out my 8-bit x server, im playing quake and running an http server.....FROM MY FUCKING CALCULATOR!!"
  • Just what I want. To do my trig homework to some soothing mp3s. Now I can't wait for math class to start AntiHero 'Windows users can right click, select "save as" and wait for the inevitable blue screen and general protection crash. Apple users can Control-Click, get some error about no "volume mount", and wonder about when their last backup was made...Linux users can wipe that smug grin off their face and go twirl their propeller caps'
  • Most americans could not point out Germany on a map

    And most Germans wouldn't find Massachusetts either

  • Actually I believe it will use an enhanced form called "Reverse Hungarian Notation".
  • The thing codenamed Xpander is going to be essentially an PDA specialized as a teaching tool and for student use.

    The _real_ HP successor calculator, codenamed Ranger, is still coming...

    (This all from public discussion from the designers/programmers over on comp.sys.hp48. Y'know, Usenet? The thing slashdot-type weblogs were supposed to replace?)
  • Holy crap! That wallet is even better than Jules' "Bad Mother F**ker" in Pulp Fiction! I laughed my ass off when I saw that.
  • Batteries, Batteries, Batteries! Running a fast CPU takes quite a bit of energy, and nobody is going to want a calculator that uses up four AAA batteries in 4 hours.
    Sheesh. Am I the only guy here that remembers that calculators used to come with power adapters? ;)

    Heck, those old HPs with the plasma tube readouts wouldn't even run on batteries. The plasma tubes themselves required somewhere in the 50-200V for the bias voltage, IIRC..

  • Why not run WinCE on this thing, or a pocket version of HP's Unix?
  • MP3 capabilities? For the love of god of your choice, why? It's tarting to sound like a WinCE handheld! More importantly, MP3 playing would probably get it banned from school use entirely.
    -J
  • I think a calculator is defined more by the UI than the functions it provides. I don't care how feature-complete a graphical (or text-based?) calculator program may be, I'll still be faster and more productive using my old HP (assuming I don't need online help, which is a pretty big assumption). If they're making the UI much more generic to allow MP3 playing, then that's bad, but if it still looks like a calculator, it's still a calculator to me.
  • UGH

    From the site....

    a 32 bit, 133MHz RISC CPU a 320x200 screen with 256 shades of gray true sound for reading mp3's (mmmm... drool) possibly a "futuristic look"

    The thing has true sound and the 'for reading mp3's sounds more like something the author stuck in there.....

    It looks like to me that was just the authors comment...

    it has 256 shades of grey.. dont go bananas this is not even really official from the company or anything folks..

    That was my inital response also.. but it kind of led me to think maybe it was a bit of an exaggeration.. which I think it is someone may write a Mp3 program but it is just going to have a better sound system yb the looks of it

    Jeremy


    If you think education is expensive, try ignornace
  • Actually the 48G is way to slow for some things.
    Try building a bode plot using the built in scripting langauge. It took about 2 minutes, although I'm sure that was mostly due to the scripting language.

    You can never have too much CPU, as long as the batteries last....
  • MP3s on a calculator? At last! The prophecy of Kraftwerk has come true!

    Quote:
    "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator ...By pressing on a special key it plays a little melody"

    Calculators and music. Together again, for the first time. Yay.

  • If it runs Linux, does it mean that Octave, Yorick, Gnuplot or MuPad is possible for this thing?
    Or better yet, Maple or Matlab. They may be proprietary, but they are excellent tools, and they run under Linux. Forget pressing "the long s"...how about int(f(x), x=0..4); ?

  • 92 is based on Derive, from what I hear.... the ultamite caluclator is a Compaq iPaq running Linux and Mupad!

  • Once you learn it, RPM beats algebraic notation hands down. It is especially nifty for programmable calculators

    Yeah, it beats the heck out of DEB when doing those nasty LaGrangian Multipliers.

  • Re:Calculator to end all calculators? (Score:3)

    by Fred Ferrigno ( 122319 ) on Monday August 07, 2000 @04:58AM (#873631)
    PDA interfaces are generally designed for organizer type things, which can be reduced the a small set of functions that generally need to be accessed at the same time. Have you seen an HP calculator with all those keys? A stylus-driven menu system is much too slow and inconvient for the number of functions required by a modern programmable calculator. This is why even the most advanced Palm calculator software doesn't come close to the complexity inherant in these things; you may use it for quick 4-function calculations, but for hardcore stuff, you're going ditch that PDA and its clunky interface.

    Are you going to sit in math class trying to tap your way through a tough calculus problem? I think not.

    --
  • I think universities in the UK particularly still put way too much emphasis on your mathematical abilities (when u aren't studying maths).

    Personally I cant see why it makes any difference whether or not I need a calculator to work out a 2nd order linear differential equation, but it would make more sense to lay the emphasis on applying that to circuits and physics models.

    Mind you as it happens i'm quite happy to pick up marks for copying the answers from my calculator :)
  • In fact, I learned programming on it. RPN is superior to the "normal" way

    close. prefix notation is superior to the "normal" way. go learn more about the programming language lisp.

    (does it even have a name?).

    the "normal" was is called "infix".

  • I was sure someone would mention this.. the number one thing I love about my HP48 (and my former HP100LX) was the wonderful tactile response of the keys. It made up for not being able to have large keys, and you knew when you pressed something - you got a nice *thuck* sound.

    The 49 IIRC doens't have the nice keys, and I hope this one does (although, what I'd like even more is a clip on keyboard for my palm that has the tactile keys in a 5 x 5 matrix or something. (Anyone want to manufacture that? I'll buy one now)

    I just home the engineers strangled whoever made the descision not to use the nice keys! Let's make it in pretty "blueberry", but we'll through away a primary usability factor because it'll save $4/unit. Not to mention axing IR (like anyone ever used it to talk in an exam; You got like 2 feet max unless you heavily modified it and/or designed an amplifier/repeater box..)

  • Re:Reverse Polish Notation? (Score:3)

    by styopa ( 58097 ) <hillsr@color a d o . e du> on Monday August 07, 2000 @05:00AM (#873648) Homepage
    Frankly, I won't even consider buying it unless it uses RPN. Not only do I believe that it is faster than other methods out there but I love being able to say that my calculator does math like Yoda speaks.
    <Yoda_Accent>One Two plus, hmm.</Yoda_Accent>
  • ... For the "Futuristic look"...

    ...Which of course we all know means it will come in 4 different translucent coloured cases :-)

    Gfunk007
  • Good god, man. Don't you realize there is a world wide shortage of parentheses? Entire forests of the things have been clearcut just to supply the few Lisp programmers in the world. Don't encourage waste.
  • but... can it integrate symbolically, multiply arbitrary length numbers, do trig functions, and draw 3D graphs? I agree, its maybe better than a 4-function calculator, but I like my 92 a lot more than a little 4-function (or scientific). As soon as you add reasonable size buttons to do all that, it fills up the whole screen and is unusable. Also, I like being able to feel the buttons and their edges. I can't touch type without it.

    ---
  • Okay, first, you'd likely want keys on your "LinuxCalc" for things like mv, cat, grep, cut, and of course for things like | and <.


    I do not want a key anywhere on my "LinuxCalc" labelled "rm". Two keystrokes is the absolute minimum that I want to type to remove anything!

  • I certainly agree with your statement. However, 99% of the population is a mere download away from being able to MP3-encode a self-recorded .wav, while other formats are not quite as accessible to the general public. That alone gives MP3s at least a little bit of an advantage.

  • I would rather use this in math class than a PDA with math software. Personally, I am a TI fan (hate that RPN), and I use my TI92+ whenever I need to do math. If I'm sitting at the computer, and need to do a little math, be it addition or whatever, the calculator is easier than a calc program. Why? several reasons:

    keyboard is specialized. I know, there's that little numeric thingy on the right, but it's still hard to use. Where's the parenthesis, exponentiation, integration, log, trig, and other buttons?

    the keyboard is right next to the screen. Also, any program needs either mouse or typing to do anything interesting, and shifting b/w the little keypad and the full keyboard is a pain.

    performance: Even if you write a good math software package for a PDA, a large part of that calculator's price tag goes to developing a very FAST math package. I tried writing some of it over, and it went SLOW. Palm doesn't want to add $10 to the list price so their PDA can integrate effectively. HP is fine adding $10 to list so it can do appointments, MP3, and other features, because people will pay for that (and the 66MHz processor).

    lastly, anyone know how long the batteries last? My 92 runs 6mo at my usage pattern on 4AA. That's a lot of hours.

    ---

  • A built-in MP3 player doesn't just mean that you can listen to music in math or science class, it has more formal uses as well, especially in tutorials.

    The most likely tutorial application will probably be in natural language courses, but there is an even more appropriate one for which calculation and sound are necessary partners: computer music + sound sythesis design and performance. It's a mathematical subject that benefits greatly from graphic representation and obviously requires sound as well. This new HP sounds like an ideal portable tool for studies in this area.
  • My Palm Pilot calculator does math, trig, financial (TVM), logic, statistics, as well as time, weight, length, area, temperature, volume, power/energy and currency conversions. Try to integrate on your HP/Ti calc.

    He meant integrate, as in calculus, which is something TI and HP calculators do quite well. While there is no reason why a symbolic math program couldn't be written for a Palm Pilot, I haven't seen one -- it would be considerbly harder to write than trivial unit conversion programs.
  • HP clacs can do RPN and Algebraic notation so if you don't like RPN you can use the "normal" way.
  • First of all, this doesn't sound much like a calculator. It sounds more like a PDA. I mean the thing can play mp3s - at some point you can't call it a calculator anymore.

    Secondly, PalmPilots, et al. are really the calculators to end all calculators anyway. Why buy a piece of hardware that only does one thing, when you could have one that runs whatever calculator software you like and a bunch of other stuff too. Want a calculator that uses infix notation? Install this application. Prefer RPN? Use this other program. Hell, use them both!

    The days of dedicated hardware are gone. Even game consoles can do other things besides play games.

  • Linux on an HP calculator (Score:4)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Monday August 07, 2000 @04:32AM (#873696)
    Can you just imagine having to put your command line args in RPN?

    MyCalc%> mv file1 file2
    error: argument missing
    MyCalc%> file1 file2 mv
    MyCalc%> cat /etc/passwd | grep fascdot | cut -d: -f7
    cut: error: argument "|" is invalid
    (I was going to re-write that in RPN, but I can't even figure out how pipelining would work--so forget it)
    --
  • I thought I was in hog-heaven when I got to run Z-Shell [ticalc.org] on my TI-85. Nowadays you kiddies are spoiled rotten, color screens, more than 20 mHz . . .

    Slightly more seriously (and I say slightly with a reason) has anyone ever considered a fully scientific/graphing calc program for a handheld? It would seem that, with the right software, the removal of the linear input requirements would help your IO. Of course, I'm not sure if the average Palm has enough muscle to push out that kind of processing, and this Xpander [ticalc.org] almost certainly has a high-level math-optimized instruction set or coprocessor.

    Oh how I pine for the days of yore, when we wrote real code on a numeric keypad (with trig functions for added fun!) and our upgrades to 20 mHz made us demigods.

  • I already carry around a TI-89 calc, and a palm. Am I going to need to get one of those photographers vests?
  • I think you are forgetting something: there is currently no software package easily available for the Palm that makes it a viable option to, say, the HP 48SX (which I have). Not only can I use my HP to solve equations, visualize functions, muck about with matrixes etc. -- I can also trust that the people who wrote the software knew what they were doing so that I do not get any unpleasant surprises.

    Also, my HP calculator has a physical interface that makes it faster to use. It has keys, (and very good quality keys at that). Plenty of keys. A stylus interface can't compete with that. At least not nowadays.

    Sure, they are all computers. PDAs, calculators, laptops. It is not about the CPUs, the amount of memory etc. It is about the software they run and the kind of use their physical interface is best suited for.

    The Palm Pilot is a poor substitute for my HP 48SX. (It is an even poorer substitute for my girlfriend's HP 48GX).

  • Yes, this is going to blur the line between a calculator and a PDA. This is a calculator that can function as a PDA, a Palm is a PDA that can function as a calculator. What's the difference? The user interface on each is geared to optimize it's primary intended use. Personally, I'd rather have a really good calculator that can also store my appointments & addresses than an address book that I can do math on.

    Personally, I want an electronic equivilent to my leatherman multi-tool -- I'd want it to be able to function as a packet analyzer/sniffer, multimeter, and oscilliscope (maybe), as well having a graphing calculator and PDA functionality. If somebody came out with somthing that did all of this (or even a sizeable fraction), I'd plunk down some serious coin without hesitation. If it can play MP3's and replace my remote controls too, that's icing on the cake. Talk about the ultimate geek toy... [leatherman.co.uk]


    "The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

  • 128 shades of gray is insignificant if it can still run under heavy use for 6 months on just one set of batteries.
  • serial ports? usb? (ETHERNET??!!??)? IDE? SCSI?

  • Shades of grey? (Score:3)

    by aliastnb ( 155659 ) on Monday August 07, 2000 @04:36AM (#873728)
    I for one like the look of this new super-calculator apart from one thing: the 256 Shades of grey. I have found that the most useful functions of graphic calculators are for graphing functions. Now if you put more than one function on the same graphm, you need some way of distinguishing these. Drawing them in different shades may be enough, but for me the best way would to do it in colour.

    256 colours are far better than 256 greys, simply because they are easier to distinguish. This is what graphing calculators have needed for a long time, and there still aren't enough of them to do it.

    And am I the only one who thinks the MP3 paying is a bit over the top? If I wanted an MP3 player I'd buy a Rio. A Calculator is for mathematics. Try to move to an all-purpose device and all to often you get something which doesn't perform any of its tasks particularly well...

    --

  • Straight from the horse's mouth (Score:3)

    by BlueCalx- ( 59283 ) on Monday August 07, 2000 @06:34AM (#873738) Homepage
    Hey folks! I work at ticalc.org (and I posted the news item in question), and I have a few more points to add to the fray of discussion here. Hope I'm not afflicted with Late Poster Syndrome(TM):
    • The device will almost definitely run WinCE as its OS. I have no idea why, and there's no reason from the company (or for the company to do so, aside from mad development cizash from Microsoft). Don't get your hopes up, though. I have a WinCE device (that I got for free, heh-heh) and it's not THAT bad. Just expensive.
    • Everything has a "futuristic look" these days. Palm V, i-Opener, iMac, et cetera. This is HP's answer to TI's translucent color slide cases [ti.com]. Knee-jerk reaction.
    Hope these both prove helpful. Though there's the possibility that it will run Pocket Linux in ADDITION to WinCE, it looks like WinCE is around to stay. *sob*
  • This excerpt from "Pocket Calculator" is more likely referring to late-70's/early 80's Japanese calculators with tones associated with the numeric keys (I had a Casio one with clocks & alarms as well). You could press equals and it would "play" the displayed results.

    At the very beginning of that trend, some calculators supplied a "special key" that would generate a random 8-digit number and play it.

    I don't know for sure, but I suspect the audio in that song sampled just such a calculator.

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