"John Larkin" wrote in message
...
Is the new 35S okay?

Based on what you've said about the 35, I'd say that the 35S is mostly OK.
Things they could have done better on:

-- STO is shifted-RCL (it should have been its own key!)
-- Using (and converting between) hex/octal/binary is questionably
implemented. Regardless of the display mode, numbers entered are always
considered decimal unless you suffic them with "h" "o" or "b" -- which
requires two keystrokes. Every other implementation I've used assumed that,
if you're displaying things it hex, it implies you want to then enter numbers
in hex as well.
-- For programming, there's no REAL(x) or IMAG(x). There is ARG(x) and
MAG(x), so you can extract the real and imaginary parts of a number using
MAG(x)*cos(ARG(x)) etc., but numerically that's not quite as desirable. To
make matters worse, there's a bug that makes the transcendental functions far
less accurate than they should be for angles near 90 degrees.
-- Oddly, taking the square root of a complex number doesn't work, but you can
raise it to the 0.5 power instead.
-- The display routine isn't particularly "smart" for complex numbers.
Something like -j0.1592 displays, in engineering mode, as
"0.000e0i-159.2e-3" -- with the "3" cut off the end of the display (you press
the right arrow to scroll).

Still, it's definitely HP's best effort in a long time. Definitely qualifies
as "good" in my book -- just not "excellent" like the older machines. For
quite some time HP's calculators definitely seemed to be getting worse, after
the HP/Agilent split caused the shutdown of the Corvallis, OR calculator
division. Calculators then bounced around between Singapore and Australia a
bit, and now they're finally back in Boise... mostly. The guys working on
them now definitely seem to have their heads screwed on right, and from what
was said at the conference it appears that there really is a chance HP will
return to "excellent" calculators in the next couple of years.

Here's one data point: My boss's last HP calculator was the HP-32S, and he's
been quite happy with the new 35S... so much so he bought two.

A more in-depth review of the 35S:
http://www.hpcc.org/datafile/V26Special/the35s.pdf

They should have precisely cloned the 35!

Well, HP didn't, but there are many dozens of HP-35 emulators out there these
days (for PCs, PDAs, etc.). There's even one guy (Eric Smith) who wrote a CPU
emulator for the old HP calculators and built actual hardware (off-the-shelf
LCD and ARM CPU running the emulator) to recreate some of the old models. One
snag was getting a ROM dump... for the HP-35, they did it optically! --
http://www.pmonta.com/calculators/hp-35/

---Joel