Calculator conundrum
-
Back in school I was a huge calculator geek :rolleyes:. I bought my HP48G when I was a Junior in High School ('93) and started writing little RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp) programs. Soon I built my own cable and transferred all kinds of System RPL and asm apps (mainly games) using my Amiga. Used the thing all throughout college... ...Fast forward to 2002 and you'll notice that advanced graphing calculators have have advanced virtually -nil- in those eight years! This is incredible! How could this technology have stagnated so badly? I heard HP stopped new development on new calcs a couple of years ago; did TI and Casio and everybody else stop too? Prices have barely gone down in that time, too! The HP48GX still sells for $140 street (Amazon). For that you get a whopping 128k memory, a 4-bit 4 MHz processor, and a 131x64 LCD display. These things should cost no more than $3 to make by now. At the same time there is little serious math software available for handhelds (Palm or PocketPC). There are some calculator craplets, a couple decent RPN apps, and some weak attempts to port symbolic math packages, but the last time I checked there wasn't much that could match my ancient HP48. What happened? Most pros probably use Maple/Mathematica/Matlab on a desktop, but it seems that there would be some kind of market for students and scientists that work in the field (not to mention convenience). I can think of a thousand ways to make these devices better, especially now that handwriting recognition is decent. Even if they don't significantly increase the capabilities of the calculators aimed at students for fear of cheating, why can't they at least improve the sluggish speed and reduce the price? They still graph simple equations at the rate an ant could walk across the screen, and other operations are no better. (No specific reason for this rant. I wonder about this all the time and the Flipcode post set me off.) :-D
-
Back in school I was a huge calculator geek :rolleyes:. I bought my HP48G when I was a Junior in High School ('93) and started writing little RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp) programs. Soon I built my own cable and transferred all kinds of System RPL and asm apps (mainly games) using my Amiga. Used the thing all throughout college... ...Fast forward to 2002 and you'll notice that advanced graphing calculators have have advanced virtually -nil- in those eight years! This is incredible! How could this technology have stagnated so badly? I heard HP stopped new development on new calcs a couple of years ago; did TI and Casio and everybody else stop too? Prices have barely gone down in that time, too! The HP48GX still sells for $140 street (Amazon). For that you get a whopping 128k memory, a 4-bit 4 MHz processor, and a 131x64 LCD display. These things should cost no more than $3 to make by now. At the same time there is little serious math software available for handhelds (Palm or PocketPC). There are some calculator craplets, a couple decent RPN apps, and some weak attempts to port symbolic math packages, but the last time I checked there wasn't much that could match my ancient HP48. What happened? Most pros probably use Maple/Mathematica/Matlab on a desktop, but it seems that there would be some kind of market for students and scientists that work in the field (not to mention convenience). I can think of a thousand ways to make these devices better, especially now that handwriting recognition is decent. Even if they don't significantly increase the capabilities of the calculators aimed at students for fear of cheating, why can't they at least improve the sluggish speed and reduce the price? They still graph simple equations at the rate an ant could walk across the screen, and other operations are no better. (No specific reason for this rant. I wonder about this all the time and the Flipcode post set me off.) :-D
This is a developer's forum - make your own graphical calc app for palm/pocketpc, and sell it for huge amounts of money :-D A quick google search found this page which has hp calc emulators on it http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/pc/emulators/[^] - there are WinCE and PocketPC versions of the HP calc emus -- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!