HP Prime or HP 50g

[Michael de Estrada]

(01-25-2015 05:35 PM)RyanB Wrote:  I am a practicing engineer and my reason for abandoning the Prime at work in favor of a 50g or 48g may seem silly, but here goes: it's the solve application.

My common use of my calculator is to do a quick numeric solution to a simple equation. Usually an equation with several variables and I want to solve for just one of them (knowing all the others).

Pick up my 50g, enter equation (in numeric solve), enter all the known values, highlight the variable I want solved, press solve. Done. I do this many times every day, often with many different equations with all sorts of different variables.

On the Prime....ugh. Enter equation, and immediately be thwarted because you didn't predefine all those variables in the equation! I just want to enter the equation and solve, stop making me predefine everything because I'm going to give you the numeric values to substitute for those other variables.

It was so slow and cumbersome that I had to give it up. I kept finding myself starting on the Prime and then grabbing my 50g to get a quick answer and keep working. My prime sits at home gathering dust, which is a miserable fate for such a device.

I accept if I am mistaken in some way, but I wanted to give my experience as a regular working engineer. I think there is some way you can make the Prime ask you if you want to create a variable you haven't previously defined, so maybe I'm the problem.

-Ryan

No Ryan, you're not the problem. The Prime has a lot of neat capabilities and is much faster than the 50g, but in many ways it is a lot less convenient to use. I bought my Prime long after I retired as a practicing engineer as a toy to keep my mind from atrophying, but would never have used it at work. In fact, a few years ago I bought a second 50g, and quickly cloned it by archiving the old 50g to an SD card, and then doing a restore on the new one. I still use my 50g more than I do the Prime for many tasks such as units conversions (much simpler) or date / calendar calculations, which incredibly was omitted from the Prime function catalog. I think the Prime has a lot of potential in the educational market, but don't think it will ever be a very good engineering tool.