I'm in love

[massimo]

After reading forums and after watching videos (even unboxing ones), I decided to buy an HP Prime. I received it last week and I'm fallen in love with it. But the most relevant fact is that I'm not using RPN and I'm not lacking it!

I see HP Prime as a sort of mathematical small notepad. The touch screen makes it immediate to use. If I consider RPN (or SOA) as an user interface mechanism, (as a shell that manage the interaction with machine), then RPN was the best one for pocket calculators. Today I think that the HP Prime touch/keyboard interface is superior. It's like moving from keyboards and green screens to GUIs based on WIMP.

Awesome!

P.S.: however, there are some glitches to correct. And the contrast of text on the keys is terrible.

[Tugdual]

I think you raise a good point when you oppose pocket calculators and the Prime and I do not refer only to the size of the calculator. I purchased a Prime with the expectation it would be full featured and cool for base conversions, unit conversions, CAS, RPN and much more.
Unfortunately you'll soon discover the many drawbacks; conversions are impractical, free Maxima on Android is better than XCAS, you cannot easily derivate a function and pass it to the draw application, RPN is not easy to use on this calculator, programming litteraly requires a computer, too much emphasys on the use of the alpa keys, etc etc... This is no longer a pocket calculator but a very bad small computer.
At the end of the day, the most important questions are: what do you need and how does the calculator fulfill your need. The Prime is certainly a nice object and I had good fun with it but it now takes the dust and I went back on my 15C... to perform daily calculations.
I'll check further updates of the firmware but I'm concerned it may not be a priority for HP to actually invest any more money and time on this product to make it better.
I also think the Prime could be a fantastic platform for a repurposing project.

[Helge Gabert]

In defense of the Prime, I have to say that I like it more and more. It is different from my RPN/RPL calculators, but the Prime Programming Language is complete, powerful, and fast (maybe only lacking compiled local variables).

The CAS is well thought out, with a (mostly) unifying syntax, and rich command set. Calculations on the home screen keep the CAS at arm's length - - which at first I first didn't like, but now I see the advantages of that, and they can be performed in RPN (although I don't see a reason for that any more, given how easy it is to grab objects from the history).

Bugs are slowly but surely being taken care of. The development team appears to listen to suggestions - - the November 2013 update made the system much more stable. It would be nice if the "Get from Home/Get from CAS" menu could automatically convert the uppercase variables to lowercase (and vice versa).

[massimo]

Some of your objections can be applied to 50g (and the entire family from 28S), too. And some others indicates that you are bound to the old RPN calculators. I know very well the syndrome because I began with a HP-34C. :-)

I think that you must get used to the Prime new UI because it is different.