Yesterday, newRPL had its first day at work. I put a 50g loaded with the latest firmware (very close candidate to become Alpha demo 5), and headed out to the office for some real world number-crunching. I'm pleased with the overall feel of the keyboard and the quick stack operation. The first demo has very limited UI, merely the stack is functional and most of the keys in the keyboard. While there are no working soft-menus yet, all commands can be typed in Alpha mode if they are not available directly on the keyboard.
The OFF functionality is not implemented yet, so the calculator stayed ON for over four hours.
As expected, the fast mode almost never kicked in during simple number crunching, which helps conserve batteries as the calculator remains running at only 6 MHz.
The speed of transcendental functions was somewhat disappointing, more optimization is needed in that area.
Overall, using newRPL was just as pleasant as using the 50g, and more important, it got the job done without any crashes. I had to pull a battery to finally put it to rest at the end of the day, and that's a good sign. A few more tweaks here and there and the new demo will be ready to be released to the public.