New HP15c LE batch arrived

Yesterday I received the last batch of HP15c Limited Edition. The several boxes of 10 units that I have received have packing dates from 12.4.2012 to 13.4.2012 (European date convention!!). All of them have the initial firmware, i.e. 15.4.2011. This means that in this last release, you will see the same couple of quirks that have affected all units so far.

Quality of keyboard seems, if anything, to have improved over my first unit. And now, when talking about "HP15c Limited Edition", you need to know that the unit I took out of the box had a serial number over 23.000 !! You can imagine that the total production might have been 25.000 units - and that's already a significant percentage of what the original 15c was! (We've been told that over 100.000 units were sold during its original production time - probably up to 150.000 if we count all origins). While 25.000 is a small number when compared with the millions of typical smartphone products, it is already a significant number for a premium calculator.

I hope that someone sees that there are tools that are just "good enough", and don't need to be changed every couple of years for the next best thing. The HP15c is one of them, and deserves to be a part of the HP calculator line, not as a Limited Edition but on its own right.

By the way, many think that the HP42s deserves similar position - but its reissue is much more unlikely, given the development means available and the size of the assignment - unless they take the work of significant members of our community to go faster. For now, let's rejoice in our luck and enjoy the HP15c LE. We do not know if we're going to have it for a long time. I will stop sales when I have just 10 left - and that'll be enough for myself and my children.