Euler Identity in Home

[debrouxl]

Indeed, I think that all of us can agree on the fact that all calculators manufacturers could use newer parts which do more work for about the same amount of energy (Cortex-A5 instead of ARM9), they could provide and enjoy better hardware (the figures of the $150 Nspire CX CAS and Prime calculators wrt. $35 RPi or $45 BBB are pretty damning), they could implement larger mantissas for floating-point numbers (or even arbitrary precision floating-point numbers, at even higher performance cost). But they don't.

Quote:Other suppliers such as Casio seem to be willing to make more radical efforts to bring the calculator up to date.

If you're talking about Casio's newest models such as the fx-CP400 II or the fx-FD10 Pro, I disagree with you

The fx-CP400 is not much of an improvement over the decade-old CP300 and CP330. Sure, it's got a large touch screen, but for the rest... mild processor using uncommon ISA (the Nspire and Prime rightfully use ARM processors, like most of the rest of the modern embedded world), low amount of RAM and Flash (both are far below those of a '2007 Nspire with a grayscale screen), BASIC slowness inherited from the CP300/330 (a simple high school level algorithm was shown to execute two orders of magnitude slower on a fx-CP400 than on a TI-82), initial OS versions not taking advantage of color and touch as much as they could, closed platform - and last but not least, a higher price tag than a Nspire CX CAS or a Prime...

The fx-FD10 Pro's point is to be ruggedized for midly harsh environments, and indeed, it should do (much) better at that task than other calculator models. Beyond that, well... the "superior brain" claimed on Casio's page is actually the same old brain as other existing Casio models, harking back even further in the past. Less user-accessible RAM than a '1995 TI-92, less user-accessible Flash memory than a '2002 TI-V200 (hardly more than a '1998 TI-89 or '2003 HP-49G+). There's a SD card slot, but the HP-49G+ has provided that for over a decade.