I am going to present a first look at the new Hewlett Packard HP 10bii+ financial calculator. This is a continuation of HP's 10b's series.
A Little History
Hewlett Packard first introduced us to the HP 10b series with the classic HP 10b in 1988. The original featured time value of money calculations, interest conversions, 14 cash flows, with each flow allowed to be repeated up to 99 times, linear regression, percent change, and profit solvers (cost-sell-margin-markup).
The original HP 10b had 15 storage registers, however 6 of them were for statistics.
In 2001, Hewlett Packard updated the HP 10b with the HP 10bii. The function set remained pretty much the same, except there were only 10 memory registers. The trade off was that all the statistics measurements had dedicated registers.
In 2011, Hewlett Packard introduced the next member of the 10b line, the HP 10bii+. Here is a picture of it:
The 10bii+ At A Glance
From the picture alone, I can tell that the Hewlett Packard really packed this calculator with features. In addition to the features that the 10b line already has, the 10bii+ adds:
* Bond Calculations
* Days Between Dates Calculations
* Breakeven Calculations
* Depreciation
* Trigonometry and Hyperbolics
* Random Numbers
* Distributions: Normal and Student's t
* Proper Algebraic Mode. Calculator can be made to follow the proper order of operations.
No RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), bummer, but not a deal breaker.
One of the first features I noticed on the 10bii+ was that the factorial function is now extended to the real numbers. This is what happens when I try to calculate 2.5! on the 10bii:
I get an error message. Now when I calculate 2.5! On the HP 10bii+:
I get 2.5! = 3.3234 (to four decimal places). This is already seems like this a serious upgrade to the HP 10bii+.
In my next post I will review the many new features of the HP 10bii+. At first glance the 10bii+ looks impressive. I wish that the case that comes with it was not so snug.
What's in the Package
* Calculator
* Case
* Quick Start Guide
* CD containing the full manual in many languages, and I mean many languages: English, Spanish, French, Arabian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Italian just to new a few.
