Lionel Debroux wrote:
Probably not as many people as we, and HP, could have hoped... I think that it's partly due to the release of the Prime on the marketplace being quite late for the current school season, which makes people less likely to buy one in the very short term, despite its obvious hardware and software capabilities.
Next school season, the Prime (and the crappy fx-CP400) could have to face the Nspire CX Premium that came up to light as a side effect of an unrelated TI webinar....
Don't take me wrong, like many calculator enthusiats, I'd like the Prime to be a hit in the marketplace; not so much for the lackluster fx-CP400. However, for the number of countries where TI is pervasive in the education chain - especially the USA - it's unlikely that anything else, even good products, will manage to make a large dent into TI's market share. That's not a good thing for users and programmers...
Next school season, the Prime (and the crappy fx-CP400) could have to face the Nspire CX Premium that came up to light as a side effect of an unrelated TI webinar....
Don't take me wrong, like many calculator enthusiats, I'd like the Prime to be a hit in the marketplace; not so much for the lackluster fx-CP400. However, for the number of countries where TI is pervasive in the education chain - especially the USA - it's unlikely that anything else, even good products, will manage to make a large dent into TI's market share. That's not a good thing for users and programmers...
Yeah I think that HP missed the boat for this year, because most students already bought their calc by now. Also, there are concerns about the price, since it's 150 euros on many European resellers (although everything is at least $50 higher in Europe). I guess that for now HP should just concentrate on getting suggestions and bug reports from the few community members that will buy the calc then next school semester, the calc will be better and HP could then run a big marketing campaing with rebates and TV ads or something worldwide.
I think that to see if the HP Prime will get popular, we will have to wait until late August 2014. Kinda like what happened with the PRIZM, which came out in the middle of school year.
DavidEngle wrote:
P.s. I would be thrilled to see a PDF of the instruction manual.
There are PDFs of both the Getting Started and Instruction Guidebook floating around on the Internet, but the full instruction manual is outdated (it's a modified HP 39gII manual) so certain program code examples will not work properly (especially colors).
The manual doesn't state it clearly, but by combining the use of DIMGROB_P and BLIT_P commands, you can basically use scaled sprites and the speed is ridiculously fast.
