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Egan Ford · 12-25-2013, 05:20 PM

(12-25-2013 04:06 PM)bobh Wrote: >Strange to see CD physical media these days

Yes, I thought the same. I scanned the quick start guide for a download URL and also searched HP's web site (a poor experience). I did manage to find the User's Manual, but not the emulator or connectivity kit.

Initial thoughts:

Build: I like it, thin, not too light, keys feel like other newer HP calcs. Still getting use to the cover/case. I keep taking it off and leaving it behind. :-)
Keyboard: Colors hard to see under certain lighting conditions. I expect most will get beyond hunt/peck mode within a week and it will be less of an issue.
Screen: Pixels. With all the retina this and retina that I'd forgotten about pixels. :-) The pixels are small enough to provide a great amount of detail, but not small enough to pull off antialiasing in text. I say, embrace the pixel. Pixels are precise. Some of the fuzzy antialiasing doesn't align well with the exterior of the device.
Touch Screen: Nice. Perhaps I missed this in the User's Manual, but there does not seem to be a way to directly interface with the touch screen with PPL.
Calculator: It is very familiar, very 50g-ish. Given the target market is education, and my lack of familiarity with TI products, I cannot criticize one way or the other. I do like that RPN mode is supported. And agree with others that RPN mode with CAS is not a fit. My only suggestion would be that if RPN is not supported with a particular function (e.g. plotting), then automatically put a pair of single quotes up when in RPN mode.
Programming: I haven't started programming yet. I've scanned the User's Manual and read the code of others. I think PPL is better than RPL for students and most others in general. It's easy to think RPL when you are conditioned to do so, but for students that will most likely never program the thing again in the future, the PPL learning curve is shallow. I am amazed at some of the examples already given, esp. the 3D plotting and realtime interaction, and with such little code. I would however still like the option to use assembly and/or C. But, I'm on the fence with that as well because PPL forces an open source model. Then again with C there would be 1000s of scientific programs that could be ported to the Prime.
Connectivity: I could not find anything in the documentation that would allow for lower level programming of the I/O port. BTW, my unit did not ship with the A<->B cable for calc to calc transfer. Probably only useful if you hang with others that have the same calc, and odds are that they will have one. I'll be trying to get libhpprime working on OS/X.
Supporting Tools: Buggy would be generous. Windows only. I have not tried Wine yet, but looks like it works from other's posting. I however cannot find the latest version online to test.

Anyway, I'm more impressed that I expected to be after spot reading HP Prime comments over the last 6 months.

Looking forward to all the PPL books that will be written.