Casio Unveils New Color Screen Graphing Calculator 313
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by hobbyist calculator programmers, Casio has recently unveiled new graphing calculator models, the Casio fx-CG10/20 series, less than a year after Texas Instruments released the TI-Nspire Touchpad. The calculators features a 65536 colors screen (16-bit) with a resolution of 384x216 pixels, 16 MB of Flash memory (10 available for the user) and 140 hours of battery life. The calculators will retail starting at $129.99. Although Casio's new calculator official page have limited information about the calculator programming capabilities and processor speed, could this eventually mark the end of TI's reign in North American schools?"
Re:TI isn't going anywhere. (Score:4, Informative)
Casio already had a color calculator way back when I was in high school. The curriculum still revolved around the use of the TI-83, though, so people with anything else were pretty much on their own.
Re:Still not as versatile as an iPod Touch... (Score:3, Informative)
That and a device like an iPod Touch isn't recognized as a calculator, so like many laptops and the TI-92, it is barred in many tests were the standard calculator form factor is permitted.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
What I don't get is why someone would spend $150 on a calculator when you could get a netbook with a gig of RAM and 180 gigs of drive space with a dual core processor for the price of two of them. Kubuntu comes with a scientific calculator, and it's a free OS you can replace Windows with or install dual-boot.
I just don't know why anyone would buy a calculator, period.
They don't allow laptops into most exam rooms. There has always been a lot of places which had restrictions on graphing calculators, and required you to have standard 8(?) function calculators, or they would wipe the internal memory in a few cases.
It's probably why calculators didn't really improve much over the years, if you improved them, even if it lowered the cost, you would ironically reduce your potential market.
Yes, I RFTA'd... I'll go be in time out now (Score:3, Informative)
Somehow I doubt that Casio officially unveiled it with a forum post.
And if we did have to link to a forum post (for some unknown reason) instead of something more official, this would have been better anyway [casiocalc.org]...
Official website: http://www.casioeducation.com/prizm [casioeducation.com]
edu.casio.com: http://edu.casio.com/products/cg_series/fxcg10_20 [casio.com]
Manual download: http://edu.casio.com/products/cg_series/data/fxcg10_20_E.pdf [casio.com]
Models: fx-CG 10*/20
* North America only
Some of the new features:
- High-resolution color display (384*216 pixels with 2^16 colors)
- USB 2.0 support
- 16 MB flash memory
- Picture Plot functionality
Re:Still not as versatile as an iPod Touch... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:1, Informative)
144 Hours of battery life. That means I change batteries about once a year. And my calculator is still less than half the size of my 8" netbook.
Re:Still not as versatile as an iPod Touch... (Score:3, Informative)
The point of approved calculators for standardized testing to eliminate devices that can do things beyond the kind of assistance the test allows for, particularly things that might facilitate cheating, or which produce noise which might be distracting. See the SAT [collegeboard.com] rules, for instance.
Well, except that nothing restricts (either in principle or practice) the approved calculators to "TI Calculators".
Re:Practical Applications? (Score:3, Informative)
Red-Green Color blind here.
Purple doesn't exist and is a conspiracy against the colorblind. My daughter loves to pick out my shirts and I have at least four "blue shirts" that girls tell are lovely shades of purple.
Brown is just a different shade of green.
Re:have we see the death of RPN? (Score:1, Informative)
Also, by your definition, the automatic transmission should easily beat a stick-shift. Guess what race cars use?
For Formula 1, neither, actually. They use a semi-automatic (clutchless) sequential manual transmission with a paddle-shift interface. Your point still stands, though: they certainly don't use fully automatic transmissions.