HP-Prime: After so much whining...

[jebem]

Apparently my new calculator is doing at least one thing right: I can confirm that the battery indicator is working fine!

After unpacking and initial full charge two weeks ago, it stayed at 100% for a long time, then after so much key kicking and plotting around it came down to 75%, then went for 50%, and now it is at 25% and very alive! (see my attachments if you don't believe it).

I'm really enjoying this new "toy", and all the experimentation that all people is posting here and in the other forums as well. Thank You for sharing such a wonderful experience.
As many others HP fans posting here, I feel that this is a calculator with a great potential to be the best calculator of all. Just give it some time to evolve.

[Tim Wessman]

Thanks for the kind words. I too think it is a great device (with a few warts) and that there is a lot of potential.

[Dominik Holenstein]

jebem,

Your post reflects exactly my opinion regarding the HP Prime.

I like it, too, to explore this device and to dig deeper inside it. It is fascinating for me to learn the usage of the CAS and the more I use it the more I get a grasp of the whole potential.

The HP Prime is my everyday calculator in the meantime, the Home mode with RPN for quick calculations and the CAS to explore maths and programming.

We have to know that the User Manual of the HP Prime has more than 600 pages and many topics in it do only scratch on the surface. And the functional programming option with CAS programs has not been mentioned so far in the user guide....

I am looking forward to be part of the evolvement of the HP Prime platform.

Dominik

[Han]

(02-28-2014 05:16 PM)Dominik Holenstein Wrote:  We have to know that the User Manual of the HP Prime has more than 600 pages and many topics in it do only scratch on the surface. And the functional programming option with CAS programs has not been mentioned so far in the user guide....

I am looking forward to be part of the evolvement of the HP Prime platform.

Dominik

A lot is missing from the user guide. However, since the CAS is essentially XCAS/GIAC, you can find most of your CAS questions answered in the XCAS/GIAC documentation:

http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~parisse/giac.html

The French documents are more detailed than the English ones.

English: http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~pari...cmd_en.pdf
French: http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~pari...cmd_fr.pdf

I'm sure that if you were completely document the HP Prime (i.e. Advanced User's Guide), it would probably be close to 2500 to 3000 pages. The CAS documentation alone is already close to 800 pages.

[David Hayden]

(02-28-2014 05:16 PM)Dominik Holenstein Wrote:  We have to know that the User Manual of the HP Prime has more than 600 pages and many topics in it do only scratch on the surface.

That's true, but most of the text occupies only about 2/3 of the area between the page margins. If formatted using the full width of the margins I bet it would shrink to about 450 pages. Personally, I'd much prefer that sort of format.

Dave

[jebem]

Thanks a lot for your time to read and answer to my post, Tim.

When we think about the huge amount of mathematics logic/functions packed in this little computer, it is amazing what HP engineering team has already achieved.
This is a new project, a break from the previous excellent mature 48 Saturn platform based series, so almost everything had to be built from scratch here.

I am just starting now to read and learn from the related technical documentation, including the XCAS reference guide, recommended more than once by Han Duong, Bernard Parisse, Tim Wessman, Cyrille de Brebisson, to name just a few names that I believe are behind the Prime project.
Thank You all for your support, and please keep up the good work.

[pvrs]

When we think about the huge amount of mathematics logic/functions packed in this little computer, it is amazing what HP engineering team has already achieved.
This is a new project, a break from the previous excellent mature 48 Saturn platform based series, so almost everything had to be built from scratch here.

I agree with the above comments with very strong feelings!

[mainakae]

(02-28-2014 10:29 PM)jebem Wrote:  ...
When we think about the huge amount of mathematics logic/functions packed in this little computer, it is amazing what HP engineering team has already achieved.
This is a new project, a break from the previous excellent mature 48 Saturn platform based series, so almost everything had to be built from scratch here.

I am just starting now to read and learn from the related technical documentation, including the XCAS reference guide, recommended more than once by Han Duong, Bernard Parisse, Tim Wessman, Cyrille de Brebisson, to name just a few names that I believe are behind the Prime project.
Thank You all for your support, and please keep up the good work.

+1!

I've been the happy owner of the HP49, HP50 and now the Prime. I've been tempted to return the prime for the first days, but after I found the xcas manual I discovered another calculator behind the CAS button: the one I've felt deeply in love already. It sure has many rough edges to polish, but the sear speed and amazingness of that CAS overcomes everything else. I know some people would burn me in effigy for saying this, but I would gladly leave RPN back just for that amazing CAS.

I'm not an student any more (well, I'll always be an student, just not one that has to show teachers that I did learn the lesson), so I could be enclosed in the "professional" user kind. I use it primarily for solving problems related with my tinkering with electronics, and I've already left Maxima and Octave. Sure they are easier to deal with when in front of the computer, but I do love to have a machine whose only purpose is to help me with my maths, pen and paper at hand, and no distractions!. In that regard: this is a pice of art, great battery life, easy to recharge, great screen, great speed and for the first time a truly powerful CAS system. The spreadsheet: a winner too!. I've successfully used it to solve numerically 18 variable so far, and it takes just seconds. The computer finishes faster, sure, but it's really usable and definitely several orders of magnitude faster than the hp50

Summing up: CONGRATULATIONS!

[Craig Thomas]

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.

[rprosperi]

(01-06-2015 05:00 AM)Craig Thomas Wrote:  Apparently the best manual is only found on a non- HP website.

Which best manual is that (link please)?

If you update to the latest rev, you'll see the User Guide has been reformatted and improved considerably, but still not perfect I agree. That said, with limited resources, I have to agree with HP to prioritize effort on the firmware over the docs. Places like here can fill the gap on the docs, but not on the functionality (and bugs). In a perfect world, there should be no need to choose, but in my experience, this world just isn't perfect.

[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.

[John P]

(01-06-2015 01:46 PM)Han Wrote:  

(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.

Hello,

I agree with you what you wrote. The HP Prime is half baked product with a lot of bugs and inconsistencies. In HP, not only HP, there is no more policy 'to reach for the sky' but instead 'to reach for the bottom line'. Instead treating HP Prime like a tool to solve problems you have to concentrate on HP Prime itself and its problems plus problems you want to solve and this apply to students also. I hope there is soon similar open source calculator to free people from being used and abused by HP as beta testers.

Cheers

[Han]

Just to be clear, though, my comments were mainly directed at the folks that are responsible for handling the resources (be it financial or man-power) being put into (or withheld from) the calculator division. I don't claim to speak for the developers, but I believe that most developers -- regardless of the project -- would rather wait to have a more polished product. However, it's usually not the developers who get to choose when to publish, but the folks higher up.

[Michael de Estrada]

This is what happens when stupid marketting types and bean counters take control of new product development, and engineers and real visionaries get shuffled to the side. Long live the HP50g !

[Craig Thomas]

(01-06-2015 01:45 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(01-06-2015 05:00 AM)Craig Thomas Wrote:  Apparently the best manual is only found on a non- HP website.

Which best manual is that (link please)?

If you update to the latest rev, you'll see the User Guide has been reformatted and improved considerably, but still not perfect I agree. That said, with limited resources, I have to agree with HP to prioritize effort on the firmware over the docs. Places like here can fill the gap on the docs, but not on the functionality (and bugs). In a perfect world, there should be no need to choose, but in my experience, this world just isn't perfect.

Post #4 in this thread.....

[Craig Thomas]

(01-06-2015 01:45 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(01-06-2015 05:00 AM)Craig Thomas Wrote:  Apparently the best manual is only found on a non- HP website.

Which best manual is that (link please)?

If you update to the latest rev, you'll see the User Guide has been reformatted and improved considerably, but still not perfect I agree. That said, with limited resources, I have to agree with HP to prioritize effort on the firmware over the docs. Places like here can fill the gap on the docs, but not on the functionality (and bugs). In a perfect world, there should be no need to choose, but in my experience, this world just isn't perfect.

On the other hand, I haven't noticed HP's update to their "user guide" that you're mentioning?

[Angus]

Quote:Just to be clear, though, my comments were mainly directed at the folks that are responsible for handling the resources (be it financial or man-power) being put into (or withheld from) the calculator division.

What they don't consider are mid-and longterm effects their decisions have on other departments of the company. HP was always a no-brainer for me when dealing with technical solutions. To be honest:
After now realizing what is going on with the prime and realizing of it is treated by HP I will surely, of course think twice before getting any other HP product. How should I know that I won't be surprised what changed in different departments during the last years? Is quality still priority no. 1? Is it true what they advertise?
Of course no one will care what I think and do, but there are chances that negative reputation has its impact on a company. I know some industries here where the managment is aware that their quality must not be lowered at all costs - no matter if some brilliant brain at HP would tend to save some money on quality, because if people see that there is no difference compared to the competitors there would be no way to stand next to the cheapest alternatives....

[rprosperi]

(01-08-2015 03:25 AM)Craig Thomas Wrote:  Post #4 in this thread.....

and

On the other hand, I haven't noticed HP's update to their "user guide" that you're mentioning?

Yes thanks, I'm aware of the XCAS docs, I thought you were referring to alternate PRIME documentation I had not seen.

The new User Guide PDF is installed with the Emulator, click on Help...User Guide. It has been reformatted throughout with many improvements for content. It is not perfect, nor likely to ever be so; like XCAS, complete documentation of 100% of the features would be MUCH larger.

But it keeps getting better and that's what's most important. At least to me.

[jte]

One aspect of the calculator that hasn't been discussed much here is that it is the first calculator (to my knowledge) that, as shipped from the factory, makes any attempt to bound numerical round-off across general sequences of floating-point operations. While this ability is currently limited to the Advanced Graphing application, if it were polished up (got its is dotted and ts crossed) and further exposed to the user, this ability would, when applicable, clearly be a fundamental improvement over previous calculators (again, to my knowledge & as shipped from the factory).

(Reliable bounds on numerical error convert computed results from stating that "this is what the floating-point algorithms produced" to "the exact infinite-precision real arithmetic result lies between … and …")