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Texas Instruments Announces New Calculator
S. Kinney writes "TI recently announced the development of a new calculator, known as the Voyage 200, to replace the TI-92+. The software changes are rather minor, as the device is designed to be compatible with the 92, though the addition of a clock makes the Voyage more functional for some, and the case of the device enjoys a new design. Perhaps the most useful upgrade to the 92+ is the addition of more memory, for a sum of 2.7 MB of storage. No word on release date, but it'll be interesting to see how this comes out. It may be one more step towards releasing a modern-day Avigo, their failed PDA from a few years back. "
I would have never gotten through my long lectures without my handy tetris playing calculator.
It does look a bit odd, you have to admit.
I'm probably still sad over HP's decision to disband their calculator division. Still, in comparison, the TI calculators don't look as classy as (say) the HP-28C or its ilk - at least to my eyes.
A USB connection does seem like a nice feature.
Not being a TI user, I can't speak for their functionality. Do they have a RPN mode? What are the keys like? Are they easy to code for?
I mourn for the HP calculator division. My 11C still works great after 20 years- I keep it in my flight bag for weight and balance calcs. My 28S died last year after 14 hard years of use through college, grad school, postdoc and 2 jobs. I suspect I'll still be using my 49G years after the last of these are sitting in landfills.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
must have, more pixels.
zooming and zooming and zooming to cheat when finding the intersections of lines on paraboli is much too time consuming.
double or triple the resolution, maybe you'll only have to zoom once.
My geek 'nards just expanded 20%, and my 92+ is already starting to look like something an Amish farmer would be permitted to own.
Damn them, DAMN them for pre-announcing this!
It seems they changed the connectors. That's good, but I hope the plug sticks a bit better.
I can't remember how many times my 2 players, 2 calculators chess games crashed because the cable had moved a tiny bit.
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
I'm sorry, I don't care what the rest of you say about HP and reverse Polish notation, the TI-92+ is a thing of shear beauty, and I for one am glad that they're making a sequel. My TI-92+ was worth the money alone in both the cost of a book of integration tables as well as the time and effort of flipping through it.
Symbollic integration is a beautiful thing and it came in damned handy in my Partial Differential Equations class. Thank you, TI, for making LaPlace transforms easier to handle.
And before you all jump on my back, I'm not saying I can't do the integrals myself (I did them just fine on all the tests, thank you very much), but it kept the homework from consuming months of my life.
So bad-mouth TI's stuff all you want, I'm still probably going to get this bad boy as soon as it comes out (still have quantum mechanics classes ahead of me).
I had a TI-92 once. It was stolen a week or two afterward (this was in high school). I switched to an HP-48G the next week. There's something to be said for small and powerful rather than big and conspicuous. Too bad HP is out of the game now.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Guess TI learned from Homer:
-- Homer Simpson, on the revolutionary baby translator of which he is presented with a prototype, which makes Maggie's baby-talk intelligible.
( Immediate source)
(Note that shameless, off-topic karma-whoring is done in AC mode! Recommend adoption of practice.)
Ok, I admit that I'm a bit out of touch with advances in calculator technology. What I'm curious about is what advantages these new gizmos have over earlier graphing calculators - what do people actually do with them? In high school, graphing calculators were mandatory for calculus, so of course we did all kinds of neat things just because we had the calculators, but in college I really only used my TI-85 for repetitive calculations. Now that I deal with words more than numbers, I don't use it at all. This new calculator seems to be marketed for educational use, so what wonderful things are younger kids doing with these things in school (other than playing games and cheating on exams)? And yes, this is a serious question. I honestly want to know what role these newer calculators play in education (not enough to hunt down the answers myself of course, just out of curiosity).
I freely admit, when I was first introduced to RPN on a calculator, it seemed odd. Yet it's not some bizarre geek snobbery that has me say that it's worthwhile - after getting used to it (and it did not take long, really) it really is much more efficient.
Speaking of HP calculators in particular, they do or did have a couple of very strong points that tended to distinguish them from their peers:
The later HP graphic calculators also supported an algebraic entry mode for those who found it easier or more intuitive than RPN.
I'm glad your TI worked well for you! But there are good reasons why the HP calculators are so widely recommended.
With the demise of HP's calc division, and the continual and unparalleled suckage of TI's calculators, has anyone else thought about doing an open hardware/open source calculator design?
It'd be possible to make kits for them, even to the point of doing injection molded plastic, if you were making a few hundred or a few thousand. Circuit boards would be dirt cheap in those quantities. Just use some low power processor with decent floating point and integer performance, and make it readily expandable/hackable.
Anyone?
handy tetris playing calculator.
Which calculator is that? BPS has never authorized a TETRIS® game for the TI, Casio, or HP calculator platforms. You may have had a falling tetramino game (incidentally, here's how to make one), but it wasn't Tetris brand (for instance, I remember playing "Jetris" on a TI-89 calculator, where the J was a reversed half-uncial T); if it was, the author infringed the trademark on Tetris. We don't want ticalc.org to shut down again, do we?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Having the QWERTY, and thus the horizontal layout, prevents the calculator from being used on many college placement exams, and college exams themselves.
Watch a Dvorak Simplified Keyboard hack appear on ticalc.org.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Texas Instruments is notorious for releasing excellent consumer electronics products and then either crippling them or letting them wither and die. Witness the Avigo and the TI99/4A.
In the case of the Avigo, it was arguably a better PDA than the Palm Pilot that it was competing against. The applications it sported were certainly better and more comprehensive than those Palm was offering. However, TI made the dev kit for the Avigo platform expensive and difficult to obtain, so nobody of consequence wrote any additional software for the Avigo.
You would think Texas Instruments would have learned their lesson after doing exactly the same thing with the TI99 home computer 15 years before. Both platforms were innovative, high quality products that became commercial failures due to poor marketing and dismal support.
I have to wonder why they even bother to develop these products. It's like consumer product development and manufacturing is a hobby for them, but marketing and support are too much of a pain in the ass, so they don't do it.
Agreed. There is too much emphasis on teaching how to do something on the calculator. Once you are in college, and you understand the concepts and how to perform the mathematical calculations then it's ok to use a calculator to save you from doing an hour long calculation, however, that's as good as magic if you don't know how it worked!
Troy
That's how we HP/RPN fans feel about TI calculators- working on a calculator without RPN is simply crippling. Until you really understand RPN, you have no idea how slow other methods are.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Of course putting the test answers into flash would be problematic.
Seriously, that's what we were taught in freshman year of high school. I didn't use a calculator in HS, or College either. I, personally, don't think calculators should be used in high school math classes.
Best Slashdot Co
First of all I have to say that I'm glad they redesigned the 92(+). It's always been a great calculator but the thing is big as hell. It's thick, heavy, HUGE (which is why I like the 89). I'm sure that this one won't weight nearyly so much, which is a MAJOR plus.
It's good to hear that it's compatible with software made for the 92+. This means that tons and tons of games are all ready ready to go. If they don't work, chances are that they won't need much tweaking before they do.
Having more storage is also great. I've always fought with my calculators trying to put on all the games that I like without running out of memory. The flash on the 83+ and 89 is nice, but you can't run assembly programs out of it. You have to move them from flash to normal ram to play them, which is anoying. This is the one thing that I hope they change.
Over all looks good. I'm sorry I didn't write more, but I've got lots of surfing to do. I can't wait to get my hands on one in a store of find someone who buys one so I can check it out first hand.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This is the second time someone has come out and said that Calculators ruined their long divison ability. I just have to ask: is this really such a bad thing? It's not like long divison is really that hard to learn later in life (it's learning the multiplication tables, forward and backward, that's the real struggle), and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to work out a long divison problem by hand since grade school.
Long division is in many ways a waste of time in grade school (especially considering how long it takes to teach it to kids). The only real advantage I see to it is that it helps kids learn how to handle long complex tedious procedures (especially since you have to do a LOT of long division in grade school). If you really need the skill later in life it's not that hard to pick up (for someone who already has experiance with complex procedures).
Note, the above assumes you can already do simple division (IE, you know that 56 / 7 == 8). I recommend never letting kids look at a calculator until they have the multiplications tables (at least up to 10) memorzied fully.
Of course this is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
I read the internet for the articles.
This is very natural to the thinking of mathemeticians, engineers, and computer scientists. Furthermore, it allows you to do complex operations without needing to resort to using brackets or moving the cursor. If you need to quickly blow through a bunch of calculations, RPN is much faster than using traditional notation.
I can see not wanting to learn RPN if you aren't majoring in the above named disciplines. But if you are going into math, CS, or engineering, and RPM seems too hard for you, its time to switch majors.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
When I was back in High School, I would never have bought a TI-92 (the plus hadn't come out yet) because due to its QWERTY keyboard layout it was banned on all tests--most notably the SAT.
A couple years later when I went to college, the TI-89 came out with all the functionality of a TI-92 PLUS in a TI-86 packaging---perfect I told myself. That would have made the ultimate calculator for High School or College.
Now they go back to the TI-92 type layout. This is probably good for professionals, and it is no doubt a good machine, but I would never use it when its already larger than my Sony 505 laptop. (Granted, no good Graphic Calculator software exists for PCs besides the XP powertoy which won't run on this laptop).
I wish they had kept the TI-xx naming string too, because those models already have an established market--and with this new name, that might be lost.
Anyone bet how long it'll be until we see the TI-90 with components from this new one but in a TI-90 formfactor?
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
I graduated Comp. Engineering and Math Minor. I used the TI-85 because it was much easier, despite what you claim. I guess once you use something for a while and really try to get good at it, you can do it quickly no matter what the device is. Me personally, I didn't feel like spending my free time learning how to use a calculator, I'd rather be out doing something, so I stuck with the TI-85.
PS - as for doing multiple calculations, the TI-85 would let you copy and paste, or you could write a program in like 2 minutes that would go through everything automatically.
~ now you know
Yeah, I wonder why anybody does math with infix notation. Why can't they teach clearly more intuitive formulas like:
0 1 e i Pi * ^ + =
or:
u v * ' u ' v * v ' u * + =
in school....
You can pick up an m100 real cheap, plenty of memory, and get some great graphing software relatively cheaply (check out powerOne graphing software for the Palm). There are also some great, free RPN calcs for the Palm, and I am sure many many more other programs than will every be available for the TI.
-josh
In my university no calculators are allowed during exams, and if you're stupid enough to use them in class you don't have much chance of passing the exam (simply because you wont understand)
What university is that shortsighted? True, I can see forbidding a calculator when you're actually testing a student's ability to calculate. When a student is first learning about integrals and matrices and such, they'll appreciate the material more if they get a glimpse under the hood. But it doesn't take that many examples to get there, either.
And when you start dealing with actual math applications instead of the math itself -- as plenty of classes do -- complex or repetitive calculations just get in the way of abstract *thought*. When I'm solving a fluid dynamics problem in a physics class, I'll demonstrate *more* learning by choosing the correct expression to evaluate and letting my calculator handle the integration and unit conversions. And I'll be able to solve more problems in less time, increasing my curriculum exposure.
While calculators are obviously good, lets keep 'em out of school!
Nice contradiction.
Maybe at first...I got a 48SX my second year of college and that thing took a lot of getting used to. But, the more comfortable I got with RPN, the more I could do faster and more naturally.
I was able to upgrade to a 48GX (through the courtesy of Office Depot's Customer Service department) and I never looked back. I used that thing almost every day at school and even some at work after graduation.
I still have it here in my desk some 8+ years later and the thing works great. Now if I could find a 4MB card for less than 400 bucks...
GTRacer
- It's pretty sad when your *calculator* has a pkzip clone...
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
can't believe they didn't put an mp3 player in it, even one that could only store 10 songs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Lots of TI vs HP threads in the discussion. They are all silly. They all boil down to:
My Turing machine is better than your Turing machine!
I have a ti-89, but i use it as little as possible. In my university no calculators are allowed during exams, and if you're stupid enough to use them in class you don't have much chance of passing the exam (simply because you wont understand)
At my university, the calculus classes were optimized for calculators, and you were lost if you didn't use one, because the answers weren't round. Not that it made it any easier, you still had to show every step of solving the problem; you just used the calculator for the sake of time. In fact, the professor had a TI-85 with an overhead projector attachment so he could show how integrations looked when plotted, slope fields of differential equations, etc. He would even let us transfer the programs on his calculator via a link cable (or give handouts with programs to type in if you had a TI-81 or whatever.) He said he knows all the tricks of graphing calculators, and that people often stored "crib" in the form of text files or bitmap images on them, but he didn't worry about that, because the problems were written so that if you had taken the time to learn the material rather than entering crib on your calculator, it would take less time to do the problem because you know how to do it than it would take to scroll through a text file of crib to find the right solution and not finishing the exam when time ran out.
Damn you for linking to everything2! I'll be clicking around there for 4 hours now.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
A personal anecdote about why I ask you to read your new calculator's instruction manual before using it:
In college, I was taking an introductory Electrical Engineering course which dealt primarily with the basics of circuits and such. Our second test of the semester (we only had two tests, so this was a biggie) required you to use complex algebra to solve all of the problems. Now, complex algebra is not difficult, rather its a pain in the ass, meticulous and time consuming. So I heard that the bookstore was selling this new calculator (HP x46 or something like that) that performed complex algebra with the press of a button. Sweet! I was able to convince my parents to cough up $100 so I could run down to the store and buy one of these technological wonders. I picked one up, and sure enough - it performed complex algebra with the press of a button. I took the test the next day (which was rather easy) in record time.
When I received the test back and my score was 5 out of 100, I realized that I had been pressing the WRONG BUTTON during the entire test. Damn. Drop class, do not collect $200, go directly to the Registrar's office.
Please - learn from my mistakes and read the manual (RTFM!). One more request - no "you stupid asshole" comments; I know it was retarded.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
Actually, the 85/86 language was called TI BASIC, but as far as I can tell it doesn't resemble BASIC in any useful sense. It's really its own language.
/Brian
Actually, I wonder if you can do that -- the low-level driver routines are available on some models, hacked on others...
/brian
Um, you do realize Texas Instruments wouldn't have a Japanese name, right?
Nicotine free Amish .sig.