Subject: HP-48SX Review / HP-95LX It has been just over a year since the HP-48SX was introduced. I have used mine for just over 13 months now. Here are a few reflections after that use: HP-48SX as Calculator --------------------- The HP-48SX is a great calculator. RPN is still the only way to do routine daily calculations, and the HP-48SX is a wonderful RPN machine, with its infinite stack, etc. Clearly the best innovation the HP-48 gave calculator users was UNITs, the ability to handle dimensional units with numbers. Several engineering friends of mine have bought HP-48s JUST FOR THIS ONE FEATURE. They have owned their HP-48s for months and have never programmed them. They only use their 48 as a calculator, and they use UNITs all the time. However, the HP-48 is a bit on the big side for a calculator. If they could put UNITs into a HP-42S sized machine, that would be slick. The other very important feature is the Equation Library ROM. This should be built-into every 48. A scientific calculator needs physical constants and basic equations in ROM. This is a great thing. HP-48SX as Symbolic Manipulator ------------------------------- The 48 offers lots of neat symbolic math capabilities, more than any other hand-held or palm-top type device. Yet, for all of its power, it is just too darn slow for real work. It does not handle many common math problems. With 32 KB it runs out of memory fast. Maple on a Macintosh is so nice that I only dink around with the 48's abilities in this area. Now if it had a fast 68000... HP-48SX as Little Black Book ---------------------------- This is clearly a growing and userful market: appointments, schedules, to do lists, names, addresses, phone numbers, notes. All of these little pieces of information are perpetually bombarding us. Can the 48 handle these? Let's examine these catagories one at a time. APPOINTMENTS: The HP-48 offers an appointment mode for alarms. It is not as good as the HP-75C appointment mode done in 1982 by HP. However, it is still somewhat useful. It does simple appointments (one time events and those events that repeat every day or every week) nicely, although with some quirks. For example, it prefers events in the morning hours (AM) verses afternoon or evening hours (PM) when setting alarms. Worse yet, it cannot schedule any birthdays or other periodic events that occur yearly, or even monthly! So, it needs help in this area. However, you can write programs to do this stuff... CALENDARS and SCHEDULES: The HP-48 does not offer any built-in views of a day, week, or month at a glance. Programs have been written to do this. LISTS and NOTES: The 48 has a text editor in it, but it was designed for writing programs, not notes. And the built-in lists of the 48 are designed for programming too: there are no facilities to sort a list or to delete an element of a list. More programs need to be written, but at least they can be written. NAMES, ADDRESSES, and PHONE NUMBERS: Similar to above. Lists can be made to do the job, but they are somewhat clumsy. So overall, the HP-48SX is a not a great electronic organizer, but it is better than many of the dedicated electronic organizers, because at least you can customize the 48 and write the programs if you have the time and patience. HP-48SX as General Purpose Computer ----------------------------------- The HP-48 does not try to be a general purpose computer, but nevertheless, all of us that have one try to make it be one anyway, since there are no general purpose computers (yet) that are its size and that are worth a darn. The HP-48 needs to allow better bit and byte addressing and manipulation. For example, although it has the basic hex operations, it does not have the ability to test and set bits. You cannot use pointers or the faster (and more accurate) internal math without getting into messy undocumented stuff. RPL is a neat language, but it is a bit like Pascal: it's type checking and protections often prevent you from doing what you want. It needs more of the flexibility of C. A "break" statement for loops is a good example of the kinds of things RPL needs. RPL's extensibility is nice. Wirth's new flavor or Pascal/Modula Oberon also offers extensibility and the more conventional syntax of Pascal. Perhaps a language like Oberon would be nice to have in a palmtop General Purpose Computer instead of RPL. RPL does have many important features that should be studied nevertheless. SUMMARY ------- I have enjoyed my HP-48. It is a great calculator, and I carry it with me in my little blue bag everywhere that I carry my little blue bag, which is most everywhere. I struggle along with its appointment mode, hoping that a neat set of organizer tools will someday be created by HP on a card. The only problem is that I am out of slots... The practical answer to my problem is the HP-95LX, if I can get Turbo Pascal and Turbo C to run on it. The HP-95 is a soon to be released HP palmtop described below. *** NOTE THAT THESE SPECS ARE NOT OFFICIAL *** Name: HP-95 LX (Codename: Jaguar) Origin: Hewlett-Packard Corvallis, Oregon division Avail: April 23, 1991 intro by HP and Lotus Price: $695 CPU: Intel 8088 RAM: 512 KB expandable to 1 MB ROM: MS-DOS (version and extent unknown) Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2.2 - spreadsheet, database, graphing Lotus Metro - memo pad, appointment book, calendar, phone book Lotus Electronic Mail software HP-12C ("full range of HP business calculator mathematics") Ports: Serial port Infrared technology will allow data transfer to/from other computers Slots: 1 slot for industry standard card (HP-48SX cards?) provides for RAM card replaces a hard disc drive for data storage (HP) Wireless pager (Motorola) Fax modem (unknown third party) Keys: Qwerty keyboard; calculator 1 press keys for 123, Metro, calculator Screen: 40 x 16 line LCD (reportedly about the size of a Rolodex card) Logos: HP and Lotus logos are on the palmtop Weight: 10 ounces (also reported as 500g with batteries & 1 MB card) ---- Sources: InfoWorld, February 1991, v13 #7 p3, article by Barbara Darrow SF Chronicle, March 14th, 1991, p. C3, article by Ken Siegmann