Given up on Prime (Almost)

[debrouxl]

Quote:FX CP400 for school

Ouch. IMO, the fx-CP400 is a terrible choice, for school or otherwise:
* it's barely an improvement in functionality over the CP-300/330 from a decade older - that is, the OS barely takes advantage of the color screen's abilities;
* it's a closed platform, like the TI-Nspire series... but far fewer people are interested in opening it;
* on TI-Planet, it was shown multiple times to be extremely slow for a subset of algorithms relevant to high schoolers. The majority of algorithms runs acceptably fast on the fx-CP400, but execution of multiple simple algorithms has been shown to reproducably take up to 400s (!), which is two orders of magnitude slower than all of the TI-Z80 series, the TI-68k series, the TI-Nspire series, Casio Prizm (fx-CG10/20), HP Prime.
Changing mode from auto/exact to approx reduces the insane fx-CP400 timings on those programs, but calculators running '1970s Z80 processors, and far less RAM (not that the fx-CP400 has a decent amount thereof, compared to the Nspire and Prime), still trounce the fx-CP400 in approx mode.
* adding insult to injury, the fx-CP400 is extremely expensive for end users. Teacher special offers are more affordable - but that's natural, low price is the only way Casio can get people to buy that stinker.

I've heard about BASIC slowness of the CP-300/330 over a decade ago, and these calculators were expensive... the fx-CP400 is just the same, with the gimmick of a large color touch screen.


Needless to say, all other models have their share of defects.
The Prime has a number of unpolished areas and defects, even if Tim, Cyrille and others are hard at work on reducing them. It keeps crashing sooner or later after transferring or executing nontrivial PPL programs (above several hundreds of KBs), for instance. Too bad it has only 32 MB of RAM.