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Casio Unveils New Color Screen Graphing Calculator

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?"

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  1. Re:have we see the death of RPN? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No... RPN has more advantages than you claim, and people who have become adept at it (not just learned it as a token thing, but really learned to think in that way) almost never want to go back.

    (1) You can see intermediate results of your calculations as you go along.

    (2) Fewer keystrokes are needed to perform computations, so there are fewer opportunities for mistakes.

    (3) For highly proficient users, RPN allows for faster use of the calculator because of not having to enter and track lots of parens.

    It's a similar situation to texting on a cell phone vs touch typing. If you are used to texting and never learned to touch type, you won't truly realize how much of a superior input system touch typing is.

    But more and more our world is moving away from things that require any degree of learned skill, in favor of no or low-skill methods which yield inferior results.

  2. Re:Why? by Gazoogleheimer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Underpowered also means runs on a quartet of AAA's for months...