Is there a website describing TI Nspire platforms?

[Wes Loewer]

(11-08-2023 12:00 AM)StephenG1CMZ Wrote:  I have just been intrigued by a mention of the TI Nspire having a good keyboard to try to find out more about this.
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First, the keyboard. Someone said it had alpha keys accessible without shifting numbers on a keypad, which sounds good for programming, except it's actually an AZ keyboard not qwerty.

The Nspire has gone through several generations of keyboards. The Wikipedia article has nice pictures of them all if you want to see the layouts. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-Nspire_series) I've never heard any of them described as "good" before, but people have their own opinions. Here are mine:

The original "Clickpad" keyboard had a rather original layout with the alpha keys squeezed in between the other keys. This allowed the other keys to be larger, but it made it difficult to type the letters if you had large fingers. I had a student who had one of these and he often complained about hitting the wrong key.

The second iteration of keyboard was the "Touchpad" which put all the alpha keys at the bottom. The layout was okay, but there were several different size keys which all had a different feel when typing. The alpha keys were metal dome while the rest were rubber membrane. We had a number of these at school and the alpha keys would often have trouble registering. Some keys were rocker keys while others were regular keys. Every calculator brand's keys have a certain feel -- this one has about 5 different feels which made it hard to get into a rhythm. It felt like running while wearing one boot and one sneaker. Also, I'm not a fan of the trig functions being in a menu instead of primary keys.

The CX and CX-II models still have the same layout, but now all the keys are metal dome. This makes for a much more consistent feel. They also seem more reliable as I have not had trouble with keys not registering. In my opinion, the keys feel very stiff with a very short travel, but some prefer that.