Re: OT: palms vs hp49

[Daniel Freedman <freedman@ccmr.cornell.edu>]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2001, Sergio E. Schvezov wrote:
> * Daniel Freedman (freedman@ccmr.cornell.edu) wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 24, 2001, Sergio E. Schvezov wrote:
> > > first of all hello and sorry bout the off-topic but i have nowhere to ask,
> > > sometime earlier in this month i asked about what came to be octave, 
> > > it was really cool. 
> > > ...
> 
> > 
> > I've had an HP48 for about 7-8 years, and while I enjoy its RPN and
> > like it as a calculator, it is amazingly(!) slow in processing or
> > anything computationally heavy.  I tend to believe the HP49 is not
> > much faster.  Contrast that with the 30MHz(???, faster maybe?) RISC
> > processors (strongarm??? others, maybe) that are found in many PDA's
> > ....
> 
> > Hope this helps,
> > 
> > Daniel
> > 
>  
> well first of all as in palm i mean Palm Top or handheld as in the device 
> and i want to know if you know of any that run with something like octave
> or can replace some of or most of hp49's functions
> orry about the ambiguity in my grammar.

Hi Sergio,

Yes.  I know what you meant.  I was speaking generically about PDA's
(Personal Digital Assistants, like Palm) just because there might be
others with similar functionality that might be better for you than
Palm (with the proprietary Palm OS): for example, the Compaq PocketPC
can run Linux with even some X-Windows (or so I've heard), so I guess
it should be quite feasible to run Octave in that environment (though
I'd be hesitant myself to buy it considering MS would get royalties
from the deafult WinCE it ships with).  Instead, Sharp is supposedly
bringing out a similar PDA that natively ships with some form of
Linux.  Regardless, I chose not to comment on Palm simply because I
know very little about it (including whether or not anything like
Octave runs on it).  Instaed I shared my (somewhat negative)
experiences with the alternative you cited, an HP48/49.

Hope this helps and take care,

Daniel

-- 
Daniel A. Freedman
Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics
Department of Physics
Cornell University