HP-Prime: After so much whining...

[Han]

(01-06-2015 05:00 AM)Craig Thomas Wrote:  This product released at least a year before it was ready for market.

Various of the key labels are pretty much unreadable.

The manual is....weak.... we'll call it.

Apparently the best manual is only found on a non- HP website.

I paid HP $125 roughly, to be a Beta Tester.

Not a deal.

My impression is that pretty much any company will release products that they feel would work for the general population and then push updates as time goes by. Such is what more advanced users have to put up because of the ability to update hardware after it has already left the production lines. That's why back in the old days you wouldn't see products that weren't 99.99% complete (leaving the final 1% for the esoteric bugs that manage to slip through) reaching the shelves -- the only way to update them would have been to recall them and send out new units. This would have been too costly for any company, I would imagine. But with the internet and flash memory, an update means the company doesn't have to spend any money fixing _all_ the bugs at the time of the initial release. Some are even worse in that they stop updating after a few years and release a "new product" (e.g. Sony's Google TV).

The general population will likely use only a small portion of the features of said product. However, users such as yourself who like to go beyond just using a few features will find such business tactics quite irritating. It really pisses me off, for sure.

Anyway, I think the typical user (student) of the HP Prime -- any graphing calculator, for that matter -- will likely 1) not read the manual and rely on their instructor for guidance, 2) not do much programming and 3) use only a small fraction of the features. (This is based on my experience with students in the US.) Otherwise all the issues you've raised would have made a larger impact on HP. If every teacher or student complained loudly enough, then HP would have no choice but to put more resources into their calculator department to quickly address the issues. On this forum, it would appear that the entire world agrees with our sentiments. However, I doubt that our forum is an accurate reflection of the entire HP Prime demographics.