Omnimaga
Calculator Community => Casio Calculators => Topic started by: AngelFish on February 16, 2011, 03:28:45 am
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I'd like to present the spiritual predecessor to the Casio Prizm, the HP Xpander.
(http://holyjoe.org/hhc2003/Dsc00358.jpg)
The HP Xpander was an experimental calculator by HP that sadly never made it to market. It used an SH3 CPU running Windows CE and would have had 8MB program RAM and 16 MB ROM with an additional expansion slot. As you can see in the picture, it had a massive B/W screen with 240×320 pixels. The screen also allowed a stylus to be used instead of the butttons, making it effectively an early touchscreen calculator, back when it was announced in 2000.
Unfortunately, HP canceled the project only months before its release and few projects were ever developed for it. One can only imagine what the calculator world would look like today had this revolutionary product been released.
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Oh wow, that looks great. I wonder why they cancelled it? It also reminds me of the Casio ClassPad 300.
TI did something like that in 2007 too but they also cancelled it: http://www.datamath.org/Graphing/PLT-SHH1.htm
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Oh wow, that looks great. I wonder why they cancelled it? It also reminds me of the Casio ClassPad 300.
Good observation. :) That's because the ClassPad is actually based off this. Uses the same processor, stylus input, etc. In fact, the company that developed the software for the Xpander, Saltire, is the same company that developed the CAS for the Casio ClassPad, because when HP canceled the Xpander project, Casio immediately contracted Saltire. To make it easy to port the software from Xpander to the ClassPad, a lot of the hardware had to stay the same. IIRC, it was HP Australian R&D who developed the XPander hardware. However, they were laid off and the engineers went on to create another company and started on another project, called Project Qonos. However, they couldn't get enough pre-orders to start production so it never came to market. Hopefully, that won't happen with Project Paradise.
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Ah ok. I hope this won't happen with project paradise indeed. I would also like OTCalc to take off eventually, since it could be a cheap alternative to z80 calcs.