About calculators in general - HP vs. TI

Posted Oct 8, 2017 13:17 UTC (Sun) by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
In reply to: About calculators in general by bjlucier
Parent article: The NumWorks graphing calculator

Interesting anecdote about the lone HP user in a sea of TI calculators... That being said, I feel a need to vent a little frustration with my new (less than 2 year-old) HP 50g:

My TI-89 Titanium's display gave up after 10 years, so I got the '50g from Amazon.com at a "fire sale" price (about $70 USD packaged with a 2GB SD card); I'm unsure why it's so expensive now.

Despite lacking RPN (which I prefer), the '89 was a superior calculator, IMO. For example:

The '89 has the Π (product) function. I have yet to find this on the '50g.
Whereas Mr. Yates' TI-84 took "over three seconds" to integrate the normal distribution for -5 to 5, my shiny new '50g takes 13 seconds to (numerically) evaluate the same. At least Mr. Yates' experience with the patched NumWorks device sounds promising.
The '89 correctly evaluated the infinite sum of 2^-2n from 1 to ∞ as 1/3, but the 50g gives "1/(e^2*ln(2)-1)" (also correct but unintuitive). I have to do LNCOLLECT (through a menu) just to get "1/(2²-1)" and then EVAL to (finally) get 1/3.
Supporting both algebraic and RPN entry totally complicates the '50g's manuals (three large PDF's totaling 1765 pages!).

In summary, I'm unimpressed with the HP 50g. I thought that HP made calculators (graphing or not) superior to all other brands, but not this time.

Still, I'm intrigued by Mr. Goyet's product. Good luck to him and his company. And thanks to Mr. Yates for this article.