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The HP graphing calculators are still alive and kicking. the HP 50g is honestly a far more awesome tool than the TIs (and for those few who care, allows RPN ent
by carterschonwald 15y ago
The HP graphing calculators are still alive and kicking.
the HP 50g is honestly a far more awesome tool than the TIs (and for those few who care, allows RPN entry too). (it also has a pretty outstanding distribution of reviews on amazon)
Yes portable ipod touches and the like are moving to partially supplant these tools, but there are a lot of use cases where a calculator with dedicated physical button and a far better battery life than any apple gadget, while still fitting in your pocket and being a general purpose CAS, is quite a nice baseline.
- mturmon 15y agoAnd, at the lower end, HP also has a presence. The HP 32SII (discontinued, now $139 on ebay; originally sold for less than half that price) and the HP 35S (redesigned version of the 33 which was the ugly successor to the 32SII) are non-graphing RPN machines that are very good for quick calculations. (My first and favorite HP, the 41, is much older than these, but it's too expensive to have one laying around everywhere I might need one.) Even if I'm in front of a computer, typing in to a console window, it's faster to turn on the calculator than to enter bc, python, or matlab and type in the calculation. And with RPN you get to see the intermediate results so you know you're not forgetting something.
- mprovost 15y agodc is the standard RPN console app that's been around forever (according to Wikipedia it predates the C language). It loads instantly but I always have a terminal window running it somewhere.
- pnathan 15y agoI found the HP 49g+ to stand out far above the TI-89.