The death of calculator market?

[ramon_ea1gth]

Interesting discussion

I believe that an advanced calculator can be a great tool to stay focused while studying, e.g., engineering, and a reason to enjoy (even addictively) some of the matters being studied.

The mobile phone and related apps are really useful, as nowadays most of us carry it everywhere. But it is easy to get out of focus with all the incoming notifications and options to procrastinate while in our hands. The computer with Internet connection can also be a blessing or a nightmare in this sense. Anyway, I like having a good calc app for those cases when I have only the mobile in hand.

While studying engineering (I am thinking about electrical/telecom as examples), one of the most difficult matters is to properly integrate in our mind all the disciplines being studied: maths, physics (and management of units), statistics, linear systems, economics, electronics, radio engineering, electromagnetics, signal processing... I think that a good calculator can be a great tool to play with these subjects, create an own set of programs/applications and help with this brain integration... whether an advanced calculator is allowed or not in an exam.

I agree that an advanced calculator has to be flexible and customizable enough to get adapted to the user's preferences, so a broad set of custom operations can be chosen to be done with a few keypresses. If not, the advantage against the computer keyboard will be lost.

Of course: a different matter is what happens when getting a job. It will really depend on the position. I have found students and colleagues complaining about useless subjects studied during the degree/master that others found extremely useful and even missed having a more in-depth knowledge.

For me, I found that learning to use an advanced calculator was worth: computers, software and mobile phones change in a few years' time and new technologies replace the older ones. But the time invested in learning the calculator pays, as when you grab it again from your drawer some time later, your fingers remember where to press when you need to research some standard or special calculation.