What would you like to see in a future HP Prime II? (HP Prime², HP Prime 2X)

[jonmoore]

(04-26-2020 05:48 PM)John Keith Wrote:  I personally consider the 48SX to be the nicest looking of the RPL series but too limited in power. I would prefer New RPL running on modern hardware as in my post above, provided that Claudio could reach a software agreement as Thomas did with the DM42.

There seems to be little interest in such things at the moment though.

100% agreement. I maintain two 50g's so that one is a dedicated newRPL unit. And for my money newRPL is reaching a level of maturity where it can be considered a v1 OS. Much as the 49+/50g hardware is fast by historic HP calculator standards (outside of the Prime of course), newRPL shows what could have been possible if the 50g hadn't been running on top of an emulation layer.

I'm pretty certain that SM could build a bespoke newRPL machine that would still be competitively priced yet offer far more than current 50g hardware.

I don't see the Prime returning to RPL (I'm not even sure that they will make a high end calculator again). If they do carry on the Prime line, it will no doubt have an even greater focus on the education market. I know here in the UK it's fared very badly as the CAS system meant that it was unsuitable for all but International Baccalaureate pre college education, and for higher education it was (unfairly) seen as a high/secondary school solution. The Casio ClassPad line is the challenger brand here in the UK (much like TI they produce both CAS and non-CAS flavoured solutions), leaving the Prime to duke it out with the 35s for pre University students.

Much as the 35s has a maligned reputation, it's easy enough to keystroke program the kind of things pre-university students need - better vector/matrix support, GCD/LCM, Prime Factorisation, P/R conversion etc etc, and with Valentín Albillo's excellent solver, it breathes a vital oxygen supply to the 35's stunted complex number support. It's sluggish performance may feel like wading through molasses but at least it's allowed in the examination room (and for a far wider set of subjects than US engineering examinations).

Back to the Prime, one relatively simple feature request I'd love to see in a revision of the Prime operating system is touchscreen support for the stack. There's a nifty little iOS app based of the 28s that does this and it makes most of the standard RPL stack manipulation tools redundant during normal use. Programming workflows obviously still rely of the old school standards but for real time manipulations, a touch based stack is far more flexible.