According to the HP China agency, the students of Beijing NO.15 Middle School tests the HP Prime in the last month.

http://eduhp.cn/News/Detailed/80

The article said that on June 12th, 2013, a summer camp named "Travelling Through Mathematics and Technology" supported by HP was held in Beijing NO.15 Middle School. In the summer camp, the HP Global Education Manager Tony introduced the HP Prime.

(The translation might not be accurate at some point, but I think it's better than Google translation )

And yesterday, two testers appeared on cnCalc.

http://www.cncalc.org/thread-9240-1-1.html
http://www.cncalc.org/thread-9239-1-1.html [Blue Screen photo inside~]

They reported that some DVTs are unstable while others are a bit better. They also mentioned the "Blue Screen", which reminds us the blue screen on NSpire Color. Mutiple-touch is still disabled.

It seems that the biggest problem of the DVTs are they will be automatically turned off. And no settings can disable the feature. 

I think the DVT is more like a prototype with the pre-release version software. So hopping HP can do better on the production version.

That actually is more of a marketing activity and not really a testing type activity.

Anyone complaining/worrying about stability before the final version that arrives with the calculator is just unfamiliar with the way things work. In fact, debugging in the ROM wasn't turned off until recently. Generally, when active development for the first version of a software product is happening, anything prior to the first release are development builds or marketing samples. Usually the ROM builds run through a quick automated test to ensure they don't immediately crash with basic operations, and are supposedly sent to a selected set of people who know how to update the units and are aware of the possibility of large issues in order to give feedback on specific things.

However, sometimes those units end up in the hands of people who don't receive the update information, fail to update, choose not to or really never should have received them in the first place.

After a first release of a product things are much more stable and any sort of evaluation versions that go out are much, much more thoroughly tested because there is actually a stable location on which everything else is built upon.

Rest assured, the shipping firmware is very stable. Perfect? No. That is essentially impossible. I am sure there will be bugs found as all software of any marginal complexity will have them, but it is a very good product.

We already heard of blue screens on the HP Prime Smiley

Basically, what that shows is a dump of all the ARM registers. Allows you to track down where it crashed. If I remember my computing history, blue screens were used for error/crashes long before windows, but microsoft definitely made them famous. 

I think the DVT is more like a prototype with the pre-release version software. So hopping HP can do better on the production version.

Datamath actually has a very relevant writeup that explains it quite well (http://www.datamath.org/Story/Phoenix.htm). EVT, DVT, and PVT are standard terms in product design. It is very common to have multiple stages of them as well. For example, an EVT unit might have the near final shape, but the plastic molds don't have texturing, there are missing components, etc. It usually is at this stage that they begin testing EMI. DVT is usually the stage where the unit basically looks final and complete. This is when the final testings/certifications are usually done. PVT is for final checks to make sure the production lines are working properly and consistently. Usually, little is done here - however sometimes issues can be discovered and need resolving.

That actually is more of a marketing activity and not really a testing type activity.
...

Yeah, it very much sounds like it!
How about offering the Omnimaga community a couple of HP Prime samples so that experts here can test it more thoroughly and provide HP with some valuable end-user feedback. Wouldn't that be also a nice marketing gesture?

I like the idea of HP showcasing the calc to students. Hopefully this convinces some to choose that calc over others.

As for bug complaints, you are right when it comes to those students, but in the TI community we saw how unstable the HP 39gII could get, even 1 year after its release (even when not running any game. For example, deleting a program would freeze the calc 100% of the time even after a fresh OS reinstall), so people here are probably worrying that the Prime will just be as unstable. That said, that one (which the Prime is based on) had a brand new OS rather than a Saturn OS from the HP 48G era, so obviously it was gonna have more bugs to discover than a 84+CSE OS based heavily on the 84+SE. I guess in some ways the HP 39gII could almost be a beta of the Prime lol.

Well, the thing right now is that the calc is coming out near the end of September, so with the shipping delays and stuff, it would give very little time for testing, not to mention HP might be more willing to get the calc tested in terms of school related stuff rather than programming, since school stuff is the most important part of the calc. But of course it would definitively be nice to be able to test it so we can send suggestions or bug reports.

As for the interest, one thing I hope I keep motivation, health (and time) for is making some more games and maybe starting some bigger projects. If the calc already has a small library of games at release time this could be enough to get some students interested in buying it. Although they buy the calc for maths, they might also want to play some games on it during their spare time. Of course in United States it will be harder to sell the calc, though, because it has a CAS, so the userbase will be generally older, unless they get the calc only to code, and in general older people tend to have moved on from calc stuff long before.

As for games, though, I am not as much into the big classics like Frogger and Snake so someone else will have to do them.

Yeah true. My worry was more about the extremely short timeframe between when Omni staff would get a sample and the calc release, though. Assuming a canadian staff got the calc, count at least three weeks of shipping, no matter what shipping service is used, then the one who got the calc would only have like two-three weeks to test it, between school and/or work

Also I think the Omnimaga banner will need another update, maybe to add a second batch of calcs to the left or something, including the HP Prime. That and a front page navigation update, because it hasn't been updated since 2011 >.< (Yunhua's projects are still listed there, even though he retired a long while ago and the HP sections are still missing)

They also mention that the touch screen isn't that accurate and that the key-pad can only move horizontally/vertically, no diagonal movement when moving a cursor, for example.

Btw, is there an exact release date set? Does "September" mean the 1st? If there's ASM support i'll definitely be picking one up

Quote from: timwessman on August 16, 2013, 05:44:03 am

That actually is more of a marketing activity and not really a testing type activity.
...

Yeah, it very much sounds like it!
How about offering the Omnimaga community a couple of HP Prime samples so that experts here can test it more thoroughly and provide HP with some valuable end-user feedback. Wouldn't that be also a nice marketing gesture?

I agree, that would be pretty sweet. I'm not sure how likely that is though.

@Chickendude: There isn't any (ARM)ASM support out of the box, but it seems likely in the future...

Quote from: Lionel Debroux on August 08, 2013, 02:25:33 am

but oh well... many employees of calculator manufacturers, especially in the management chain, see openness as a threat to the business model, instead of seeing it as the asset that it always has been...

If the platform is popular enough, arbitrary native code execution and Linux will eventually come to the platform. It's only a matter of interest and time.

Nah, he was just making a rather poor joke that really didn't come across well. He definitely doesn't think that way.

Personally, I will be surprised if someone doesn't have an embedded Linux kernel booting on it a few weeks after wide availability. (S3C2416)

TW