Hpmbcalc for Windows

There's no longer a need to purchase that handheld calculator that's bigger and heavier than your cellphone and always gets lost in your backpack or purse. This nifty app can handle all your big-number calculations, and you don't have to worry about its battery running low in the middle of a tricky operation.

Hpmbcalc launches a rather cheesy, plain interface--a largely white pane with brightly colored buttons, with its different colors associated with numbers and types of functions. Despite the low design aesthetics, the app proved to offer powerful capabilities in our tests.

We liked the ease this app offered for choosing hexadecimal, decimal, octal, or binary operations simply by clicking a radio button, and we liked that the keypad keys and buttons automatically faded as they were disabled or remained active according to the type of operation selected. The designers were smart to keep the menu bar simple and keep the button bar relatively uncluttered by relying on only 10 essential icons. We also liked the contextual pop-up help bubbles that identified the entry fields for operands. The app performed very quickly and satisfactorily during our tests. The trial period seemed a little short, but may be adequate for power users to determine Hpmbcalc's suitability for their work.