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Comments on Prime's new firmware

There are few weeks left until the new HP Prime firmware arrives. We have informed about it recently, and we have given the main advantages it will come with. But let’s elaborate on a couple of new features that make the HP Prime, at last, a professional tool.prime10

The first one is the new available numbering formats. This has long been a problem for me. I use calculators everyday in my financial work; and we are using big integers (like 123456789, as opposed to one- or two-figure numbers as would be used in a class). You just can't read big numbers properly if there is not a) a separation between numbers in groups of three, and b) an alignment with a fixed number of decimals, so that you can make sense of which numbers are big and which are small.

Without these features, I always folded back to my HP41CL or HP15c. Curiously, I don't get out the best of them, the HP42s - maybe I don't want to damage it for fear of losing it. In a way, I seem to think that there will always be 41cs to modify, but not 42s

The a) thing was so simple to do that even the first HP RPN calculators were able to make it right. Even the already old HP50g was able to do it. It was a pain for me when using the Prime in a professional environment. (The second part was irrelevant in the past, since there were no additional lines - but now there are. However, it worked fine from the first firmware release)

The second thing to fix was to get consistency from app to app on how the GUI should work with finger gestures. It was surprising that the behaviour was not the same in all apps. This apparently is also mostly fixed in the new version. We look forward to increase the number of gestures available in most apps, so that we don't miss our smartphones when using the calculator.

Apparently, support for the wireless dongle and the Smartstream machinery has also been improved. This will be the object of the coming blog issues.

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