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Keys on handhelds

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Busty:
Just out of curiosity, how important is the feel of keys on handheld devices to other here?
I really like older HP calculators because the are very tactile and you can be sure that your input gets registered. My daily beater is a US manufactured HP-12c.
The keypad on the Blackberry Curve I had for a while on the other hand was one of this rubber thingies that starts out mushy and gets worse from there. I better not talk about the iPhone that replaced it. Beautiful design, but without the automatic spellchecker not usable

huha:
I don't mind the key feel on my phone, because I rearely use it anyway. Mine are somewhat hard to press, but at the very least there's tactile feedback, so I don't mind. I absolutely loathe automatic spellcheckers or word autocompletion, however. I recently tried to write a short message (which I do incredibly rarely) on my phone and got so angry because T9 startet replacing almost every word more complicated than Apple with arbitrary words, even when just adding punctuation to one I painstakingly  entered manually.

Calculators are entirely different. I absolutely love HP's keys, but sadly there's no decently priced calculator which features them. The new HP35s is too feature rich and/or expensive (and lacks critical features that would make its feature set worthwile to use, i.e. a computer interface; its keys are not bad, but I certainly don't want to constantly enter programs with them and decide what to keep because you can't back them up), the 10C is too expensive and has too few features and the HP41 is simply too expensive (although it's really awesome with magstripe readers and all).
At the moment, I'm using a TI 30X-IIs. The keys are almost totally horrible; they offer close to no tactile feel, but at least the debouncer does its job quite well, so entering calculations without constantly looking at the LCD is possible.
On the other hand, my other calculator is a Casio fx-991ES. It's not expensive and incredibly feature rich with a semi-graphical display that can't plot functions, but display fractions and square roots "like in a textbook." Oh, and it sucks so hard. I don't know what they did wrong, but it constantly loses key presses, especially when viewing/modifying large equations. It's horribly slow and the debouncer is utter crap as it seems to debounce more than neccessary, losing keys in progress. You can definitely not enter equations without looking or you'll end up with a surrealistic juxtaposition of semi-random numbers and functions. The keys feel bad. Still, I use it as my main calculator because the guts are nice, the display is nice and it's reasonably fast. But actually using the thing is a pain that wants me to have a HP41.

-huha

Busty:
I am a little too young (and greedy) for a HP41 but today I consider selling my HP48GX after university a stupidity. That was just the top of calculators, and then the whole product category went the way of the Dodo bird after that. The latest new HP (20B) looks great but that's about it. A bit like keyboards ... looks over functionality.
ps. I am German, too.

bhtooefr:
And the thing is, a lot of the old HPs go for a lot on the used market - I decided to look for a 48GX, and found that I couldn't even get a 48S for much less than a new 50g. (Which does have a decent, albeit a bit stiff, keyboard.)

My Palm Centro annoys me because the keys are stiff and are too small, although they are well spaced and have accurate tactility.

Busty:
Yes prices are high. On ebay germany is a 41CY that stands at 1700EUR

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290307833187

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