I've been reading a lot of positive reports about the 30b here on this forum and I'm glad to see HP produce a calculator that is so well received. When I first saw a 30b last year in HHC 2009, I didn't think much of it (I didn't get a 30b as there weren't enough samples for all the attendees) and I don't use financial calculators much. I do wish it has more programming memory an I/O.
This is the second new calculator that has been released by HP that's specifically for the financial field which obviously indicates this this is their strongest market. I would like to see a new scientific, programmable calculator but as was indicated to me in a previous post, there is little market for a new scientific calculator with all the other products, like Laptops, Netbooks, iPhones, etc., that do a great job and do lots of other things as well.
So, perhaps what HP could do is make the successor to the 30b be a scientific, financial calculator that would be fully programmable and have a full set of financial functions. That way financial power users would be able to program whatever they wanted to do using the scientific functions. We users with a scientific bend would also buy it to program it for our uses and ignore the financial functions.
It would also need some kind of I/O (USB) to store and retrieve programs from a PC. One area of a scientific, programmable calculator that I'm not sure how to solve is the display. One solution might be to use a 30b display on the calculator itself and reserve all graphing for the software emulator that HP would release to the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Any calculator plotting commands written in a program on the computer simulator would show up as XROM commands (a la 41C) in the calculator itself, or something more friendly to the user.
Or perhaps a display peripheral could plug into the top of this imaginary calculator's USB port, like a 41C card (you can see what old HP clacs I like) reader that would have a full dot-matrix display for local plotting. It too would have a USB port on top of the Dot-matrix display to still connect to a PC. It would be more expensive that the 30b but less than a 50G which would help fill out a line of HP calculators for various needs.
I know this is just idle dreaming but if those of us who prefer scientific calculators need to take a back seat to the needs of the financial market to get a scientific calculator built by HP, I for one am willing to sit at the back of the bus.
Just my 2 cents worth of thoughts for today. See you at HHC 2010.
Gerry