Core : ARM926EJ-S

Exactly the same as the Nspire. This means that it'll be easy to port Nspire ASM programs to the Prime (only hardware differences i.e. keyboard and LCD will have to be fixed). And also even write a game for both platforms at the same time.

Hmm sorry :x The price is set to be about 155 $/€

Darn it. I think it's a bit high to compete with the CX (which MSRP's at $129, I think).

Eh... It's much higher here...
So who knows how the price can be outside of Europe for the Prime if they really want to compete hard.

Anyway, my parents won't let me buy any new calcs with my own money, so if/when they'll let me, it's going to be a tough choice as to which calc I should buy.

Well, you should tell them my story. :-)

I was known in high school as the calculator guy. I was the one sitting there writing programs and knew everything about them. Even though I hated TI calcs with a passion and only was an HP only guy, the teachers still came to me with questions on things. I wrote some comparison documents, and some other things.

In school, I started a business with a land surveyor using the 50g as the main cpu/internal guts. I did all the software on it. (http://stakemill.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/precision-survey-solutions-dc50-data-collectors/). We did a few business plan competitions. Took home money from several of them including Fortune Small Business (http://marriottschool.byu.edu/cet/news/article?id=307, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2006/11/01/8391418/), and Rice University.

Did that for about 2 years or so until HP hired me in the calc group. Been here almost 5 years now.

Also, I met my wife due to one of those comparison documents I mentioned. Her dad was looking for a calculator for his daughter who was starting engineering courses. Her dad and I kept in touch, and later on I met her and we now have 2 kids.  :-)

Learning programming on memory restricted, slower devices gives you an amazing capability and flexibility missing from many professional software developers. You gain an understanding of how and why things work in a way many new developers never get. Granted, if you do nothing but web stuff it may not be incredibly useful, but in my time here at HP I've definitely seen how that start I had has made me much more flexible and able to jump in on all types of tasks and be productive much quicker even in areas I've not had experience with before.

TW

Yup, the specs seems eerily similar to the Nspire's but with more memory, so if HP opens up native development without too much hassle kinda like Casio (and unlike TI), that would be pretty awesome.

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but with more memory

Compared to the CX, twice the amount of NAND Flash, but half the amount of RAM, which is sad...

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so if HP opens up native development without too much hassle kinda like Casio (and unlike TI), that would be pretty awesome.

Yeah.

TI is far too entrenched in the US education system for anyone else to make a significant dent into the US education market, but the Prime is bound to gain following among calculator enthusiasts, especially if native code programming is reasonably accessible.

Also the fact that BASIC is so fast might get even more people interested since many people here on Omni prefer BASIC to ASM/C due to finding it easier to code for, but are repelled by the slow speed of TI-84+ BASIC and especially Casio BASIC.