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Sysquake has good Matlab compatibility and native GUIs on Mac (Cocoa), Windows and Linux (GTK+). Its language is the basis of innovative applications, not only a clone of Matlab: Sysquake provides interactive graphics and easy GUI development, LyME runs on Palm handhelds, and Sysquake for LaTeX (just released) provides seamless integration of graphics and computation results directly from .tex files.

Sysquake, a Matlab clone which has a version running on Palm (with svd, riccati etc.). Its benchmark hints at a version for Atari 1040ST.

LyME a calculator/grapher/programming language which verges on MATLAB for matrix processing is available for free on the PalmOS.
Very handy.

Scilab is free as in beer, but not free as in libre. It runs on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and Windows. It's pretty similar to Matlab, as best I recall. It also includes links to Maple and PVM.
Another possibility (again, not libre, but free) is LyME for the Palm Pilot. LyME is a matlab-like environment good enough for simple what-if scenarios.

Pathetic compared to WinCE based devices with ARM processors.

Lyme
http://www.calerga.com/products/LyME/index.html
benchmark results:

Generic PC Pentium Win2K 300 MHz: 350.9 444 257 380 518 288 276 294
Dell Axim X30 PXA270 626 MHz: 143.4 55 140 31 381 111 59 226
Apple PowerBook 3400 PPC603 200 MHz: 133.7 141 120 111 215 182 79 88
CerfBoard 255 XScale 400 MHz: 84.4 11 25 42 234 92 63 125
Kontron X-board SC1200 266 MHz: 76.9 65 63 81 88 142 47 52
This computer (400 Mhz Xscale 255 with PalmOS): 3.4 3 3 4 3 5 2 4
Palm Zire 71 OMAP 144 MHz, emu M68k: 1.2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1
Handspring Visor MC68EZ328 16 MHz: 0.5 0 0 1 1 1 0 1

Writing ARM code for PalmOS devices isn't very easy.

I use my PDA on college tests all the time. I could cheat- and boy, would cheating be easy. But I don't. I use my PDA as a calculator, as I'm more comfortable using GNU Maxima, Octave, a Lisp interpreter, or Palm OS LyME than a TI-8x calculator. That, and I don't have a fancy calculator and no desire to buy one or carry one around. I take all of my notes on my PDA.

In Computer Science exams where calculators were allowed, I've had profs who were a little wiser about it. In those cases, I gave them the memory card out of it and told them that's where all of my notes were. In some cases, that's been true, but for soem of the other PDAs I've owned it wasn't. I've never used it for cheating, but someone easily could.

You can store a lot of information on those fancy TI and HP calcs. Sure, not as much as on an iPod or PDA, but enough that it isn't that much different from an iPod or PDA. In high school, we used to store our formulas on the calculators. I used to have a math teacher in HS that would go through and clear each and every student's calculator's memory before a test.

But then again, neither a calculator, nor an iPod nor a PDA would be allowed on the SAT verbal. What kind of slacking proctor was running that show?

I actually prefer my T|E over PDAs like the Zaurus. The PIM features of the T|E are absolutely wonderful. Very, very well thought-out interface. When I need to do more than PIM work (or look at a star chart, or run a quick computation in LyME, etc.), I prefer my computer anyway. It's ocassionally nice to have a full linux box in your pocket, but usually it's nicer to just have a smart pad of paper. YMMV.

Another reply to your post mentioned it; I'll add my two cents: I run LyME on my Palm IIIxe.

I love it. For most stuff, it's perfectly adequate, and it's really great having much of Matlab in your back pocket with everything else that a well-used PDA carries.

I use my little old Palm for everything. Replying to e-mail (Eudora for Palm) on the PDA during downtime somewhere requires a keyboard. As such, I have it available for LyME, and generally whip it out anywhere I need more computing power than my Casio FX-991MS or TI-30XIIB. (Tangent: The Casio has *much* more features than the TI, but the TI feels more like the engineers who designed it actually use it.)

Anyway, there are two flaws I've found with LyME in my daily use, and I'm picky. Big calculations will appear to crash the Palm, but control is eventually returned (unless your function or script is faulty). More pressingly, however, I'm probably missing how to put axis on plots. axis doesn't appear to do it, and it's really hard to look at a graph where the x and y values aren't labelled!

Sometimes it feels slow. But that's the trade-off I make for having an old Palm - long battery life, and I'm not out $300+ if something happens to it.

Otherwise, I love it. Vectorizing data and using your own functions against it makes data entry dead easy in the field even using Graffiti; I can be done a calculation while someone else is still digging a notebook computer out of a briefcase.

Ah, the murderer and its victim, reunited in your desk drawer.

I do my handheld crunching with an assortment:

• Pickett N3T, retrofitted with a magnifying cursor off one of the xx-MES series (because my arm is getting shorter)
• Ecobra 1461 for trig in degrees
• Texas Instruments TI-30XII for routine stuff (love the keyboard, display, and one-touch variables)
• Casio FX-991MS for matrices and systems of equations with too much nasty stuff to do by hand, vector features come in handy when I'm too tired to take a cross product (though why they didn't allow you to enter vectors in cartesian form using the brackets and comma key is beyond me - don't think any of Casio's engineers use the thing, they just designed it to do what the marketing department told them it should do)
• Palm IIIxe with LyME - Matlab in your pocket! Need the external keyboard so that you don't go crazy trying to write a function in Graffiti

You can try LyME from Calerga. It's a lightweight Matlab clone that runs on the Palm OS.

And the best part: it's free! (as in beer)

Well, there's also LyME, and Mathpad. Not exactly Mathematica or Matlab or Maple, but if you really need that kind of power you should carry a laptop with you...

LyME is a port of LME ("Lightweight Math Engine", the heart of SysQuake) to Palm OS handheld devices. It implements more than 360 native commands, functions and operators, mostly compatible with Matlab, and 70 functions written in LME. It requires Palm OS 3.1 or higher and at least 1.5 MBytes of free memory. Palm OS 3.5 or higher is preferred; Palm OS 5 offers optimal performance and functionality.

LyME is a port of LME ("Lightweight Math Engine", the heart of SysQuake) to Palm OS handheld devices. It implements more than 360 native commands, functions and operators, mostly compatible with Matlab, and 70 functions written in LME. It requires Palm OS 3.1 or higher and at least 1.5 MBytes of free memory. Palm OS 3.5 or higher is preferred; Palm OS 5 offers optimal performance and functionality.

Considering that I use MATLAB most of the work week, I'm pretty darn happy with LyME on my Clie.

Lyme by Calerga is a free clone of Matlab for Palm OS handhelds. It's extremely powerful for engineers.

It's not open-source, but LyME is very nice for matrix computation on PalmOS.

I don't know about Octave--that would be nice--but there is a nice matrix-algebra program for PalmOS that is very similar to MATLAB: lyME.

LyME plus EasyCalc is what convinced me I never needed a specialty calculator again. If I really want to do harder number crunching, I'd want to do it on a desktop or laptop anyway.

LyME

It is a small subset of matlab for palm, complete with the basic plotting commands and differential equation solvers and everything. Far from a complete matlab clone but it comes as close as one could possibly need to have in your pocket.

My old HP28S has long gone, and after some HP48 I have found heaven on LyME
It implements about 320 native commands, functions and operators, mostly compatible with Matlab.
And yes, free as beer!

I use Sysquake, whose interactive graphics are very helpful in understanding problems. Its language is compatible with Matlab.

It implements more than 310 native commands, functions and operators, mostly compatible with Matlab, and 70 functions written in LME. It requires Palm OS 3.1 or higher and at least 1 MBytes of free memory.

Or you could use LyME, a free clone of Matlab for Palm from Calerga. It has many numerical functions, graphics, and even support for 68k machine code!