i48 4+

This version is an identical copy of the original calculator, down the the graphic interface. There was a previous reviewer that complained there was no landscape mode. The reason is simple. There isn’t one on the real calculator either.

This performs every calculation that the original does. I have compared them side-by-side. Even programming it is the same. The only issue I have with it is occasionally it will hang up so it won’t update the display as you enter things. Right now I have to close and run the app several times to make a calculation. Something Apple did with their iOS updates is messing with this app. Hopefully the developer will get an update done for it soon.

Overall I have been very happy with it and it has come in handy at my work.

This is not as good as previous hp48 emulators. I have found it to be very buggy. The worst aspect is how it seems to register only about half of the touchscreen key presses. I’m a seasoned hp48 user so i can do calculations quickly but just entering the numbers is a problem. It misses so many key presses everything gets fouled up. Same goes for all keys, like alpha, shift left, and shift right. Entering engineering units is particularly painful. I’ve also had it crash during changes of some basic mode settings. I never had such troubles with the same phone on previous emulators so i can only reason that it’s the app. Finally the app doesn’t display the alpha or shift icons on the “hp’s” screen. Rather they’re off to the left and in the case, where i’m not used to seeing them. Alpha icon is almost invisible, being black against a dark gray background. Update: the app crashed one day and no amount of input would fix it. Decided to uninstall and abandon it

This may be the perfect calculator for someone, but not for me. I am familiar with a number of HP calculators, but not the HP48 specifically, so I was looking for a little help getting started. What was there was somewhat helpful, but it by no means is sufficient to aid a rank beginner.

First of all, my preferred display orientation is landscape. The calculator's preferred orientation is portrait, so much so that once it switches to portrait orientation there is no convenient way to switch it back to landscape. The default "zoom" is full-screen (stretch), which gives a very poor aspect ratio in landscape mode.

The calculator seems to emulate the pixelation of the original's LCD display. I'd rather it took advantage of the high resolution of my iPad's display. As is, it is barely readable when zoomed to fill the screen height.

There are a number of "skins" that come with the basic download. I made the mistake of choosing an HD skin. It made my iPad screen go black and effectively disabled the calculator from any further functionality. (The settings menu is no longer available, either.) I suspect I'll have to reinstall the app to recover. Some of the skins have nice resolution, contrast, and fonts for the keys, but the stack display does not match (see above).

By comparison to the GrafNCalc83 emulation of the TI-83/84, this one suffers badly. I would like to love it, but it hasn't made that easy.