My first year in college I was faced with one of those career-altering decisions:  TI or Hp?  I had managed to get through high school with an older model TI programmable calculator but the final in my circuits course required doing complex matrices.  I tried to program the algorithm into my calculator but it just couldn’t handle it.  Of course that gave me all the excuse I needed to upgrade my calculator but which one?

The engineering student population was divided in two groups:  the TI’ers and the Hp’ers.  Like some old 50’s style gang they would snarl at each other and trade evil looks in the hallways.  One particularly bad semester things got out of hand when a group of TI’ers cornered one of the Hp’ers and forced him to use THEIR calculator on his Linear Algebra homework.  The Hp’ers found out and retaliated by replacing the batteries in all the TI calculators with those cheap dollar store brand batteries.  Right before a major exam.  That lead to an all out gang war and the National Guard had to be called in.

But I digress.  I eventually settled on an HP because I noticed that, while TI made several calculators with varying degrees of functionality, all of HP’s calculators had the same functionality but with different memory capacities.  I opted to buy an HP48G and I wound up using it for pretty much everything.  Even after finishing college I still used it as my alarm clock.  The RPN took some getting used to but all the bells and whistles more than made up for the inconvenience of learning new entry methods.

Since buying my iPhone I have been looking for a scientific calculator app so I wouldn’t have to worry about carrying my HP48G around in case I need to perform some operation on Hex or Binary numbers.  Well last week I discovered some really cool HP48 emulator apps and the best part is that they were all FREE.

They are m48 and GraphiX48.  The first is GraphiX48 which is an app that looks just like the HP48G complete with color schemes and key graphics (I wonder if HP knows).

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This I thought was really cool because the developer went all out in recreating the calculator experience.  The one problem I have with this app is that it’s really hard to press the buttons.  I tried using it several times but I kept having to retype keys and that slows you down.  Old timer note–I remember using both thumbs on the HP48G back before everyone did the same for texting.

The next app is m48 and it takes my vote for best HP48G emulator.

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Yes, the colors take some getting used to but the response is great.  The app allows other skin selections (it even has a skin for the real HP48G) but this is best-looking one (and easiest to use) in my opinion.  As I mentioned previously, I can actually use both thumbs on this app because of the larger buttons.  I haven’t take the time to put either of these apps through more stringent testing but for the occasional quick calculation they are more than adequate.

If you have a favorite calculator app by all means leave a comment and I’ll do a review on it.

Keep coding!

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