35s arrives safe and sound

[Fred Lusk]

My new 35s arrived today (please note that the "s" is lower case on the calc and documentation). It came this afternoon while I was at work. Had it shipped on time I would have gotten it last week, but once it did ship it matched the schedule promised on the tracking website. When I told my 22-yr-old daughter what I had bought, she just rolled her eyes. Hey, this is only my 11th HP. I don't have it nearly as bad as some of you other MoHPC'ers.

For those keeping track, the serial number on my machine is 72103808.

My first impressions:

-- That's the strongest, thickest plastic packaging I have encountered in quite a while. It put up a fight, but in the end I prevailed.

-- That's an awfully big door for button batteries. However, it is much easier to open and close and change batteries than on my 42S, 32Sii, and 10B.

-- The machine has a very nice feel. I think the quality of the case is up there with HP's best. The feel of the keys I would rate 9 out of 10. Not quite the near-perfect tactile feedback of the 41, but much quieter. I'm very happy that HP went back to the sloped front face like on the 41.

-- I like the placement of the rubber feet. On the 41, the top feet were too far south and pressing the ON/USER/PRGM/ALPHA keys too hard would pitch the machine forward.

-- This is one of the best looking machines HP has produced. The colors work really well, even with my aging eyes. It looks more powerful than my 42S, even though we all know it isn't.

-- I would have preferred to give up a digit to have a more easily seen decimal place like on the 42S.

-- I would have preferred in<>mm instead of in<>cm. The rest of the conversions are useful to me. I live in a metric-challenged country (USA), but I have done the site civil engineering for three federal prisons, and the Feds use metric.

-- I would have swapped R/S and Sigma+, but I understand how the keys are functionally grouped.

-- The case is OK. Not the best, but certainly not the worst. However, I don't have a use for the foam. Maybe I'll sell it :-)

-- I have only glanced at the manual, but it looks OK for a modern manual.

Now to play with my new machine.

Fred

Edited: 26 July 2007, 12:01 a.m.

[Fred Lusk]

A couple of other points that came out of playing with this last night:

-- The display is too reflective, but the contrast is excellent. I think I may add a PDA screen protector as someone else mentioned in another thread.

-- The theta symbol look way too much like an 8. Good thing complex numbers don't turn up in storm drainage design.

-- I wish there was a feet<>meters conversion instead of mile<>km.

-- I would have placed X<> above x<>Y and moved VIEW and INPUT to the left.

Fred

[Les Wright]

Got it today, and so far I love it.

It has a lot of the familiarity of the 33S, which I must admit I grudgingly loved despite its limitations.

But it looks gorgeous, and the keys feel very nice indeed.

I don't mind having to use the arrow keys to see the full result in ALL mode, since I really like all of the 12 digit mantissa there without using SHOW.

I almost didn't get it (see other thread) because I gave Samson the wrong address--off by one digit! Glad I caught it.

I am going to port over one of my fave 33S programs tonight and let all know what I think then.

Les