HP Prime

[sol740]

(08-30-2014 10:04 PM)Joe Horn Wrote:  

(08-30-2014 08:32 PM)sol740 Wrote:  That's one of the reasons I sold my HP 50G a few years ago. Awful manual.

I hope you're not referring to the HP 50g Advanced User's Reference Manual, which was in large part a labor of love (and a good example of attention to detail) by the following folks whose names might sound familiar:

Jordi Hidalgo
Joe Horn
Tony Hutchins
Ted Kerber
Wlodek Mier-Jedrzejowicz
Richard Nelson
Eric Rechlin
Jake Schwartz
Gene Wright
... and other enthusiasts whose names escape me now.

Words cannot convey how your profuse expression of gratitude moves me. I will never again be able to refer to it as having been a thankless task. All I can say is, you're welcome.

I'm going to reply with some rationality rather than HP love.

Like most things these days from HP it suffers from one massive problem:

It's just available as a PDF, it's huge and it's uneconomical to print the entire thing and HP won't ship manuals any more and the abridged users manual isn't even slightly useful.

I know you can get 3rd party printed ones as mentioned in the post above but the commitment and likelyhood of a fast turnaround suits only the enthusiast, not the professional user.

ENTIRE Casio manuals for some of their higher end devices such as the 5800P whilst not having symbolic support, are smaller than the getting started guide in paper area. There is also a quick reference in the hard shell that ships with it. That's done RIGHT.

On the basis of HP's manual policy, I have to read it on a PC and lug that around anyway (which is a large ThinkPad W540 at the moment). So I might as well use the far superior programming capabilities, performance and usability of SciPy, SymPy, Python and IPython (and now GAIC/Xcas) on a nice 1920x1080 colour screen...

The verbosity, format and availability of the HP 50G manuals pretty much hangs the device regardless of the technical achievement.

I'm aware of the third party online help stuff from hpcalc.org BTW. That was the only reason I kept using it for as long as I did. Nice job for whoever wrote all that!