Possible death of calculators in education?

[Joe Horn]

<rant> Due to human inertia, most (all?) calculators on tablets and smart phones have "keys" which stay the same size all the time, because they are trying too hard to pretend to be like physical calculators. When Oh When will SOMEBODY think outside this self-imposed BOX, and develop a touch-screen calculator which uses auto-resizing and auto-arranging TILES for function access, so that with each tile tap, the tiles not only change their nomenclature but even their size and position? If done right, using such a calculator could be MUCH more efficient than the current idiotic practice of ALWAYS showing ALL of the SAME dozens of TINY "keys", most of which are never pressed. Having larger and fewer tiles would make the calculator easier to use, and rebuilding them as needed (context-sensitive) would allow very rapid access to all functions. None of this scrolling down long alphabetical lists of cryptic names, either!

Brand new technologies often tend to slavishly imitate older technologies (partially due to the human inertia of the developers, and partially due to the human inertia of the consumers), thus missing out on many potential benefits of the new technology. For example, "GarageBand" software can imitate hundreds of already-existing physical musical instruments, but it offers NOTHING for pure music creation unshackled by physical reality, which is precisely what software OUGHT to excel at.

As long as tablet-based calculators have the same user interface as physical calculators, then physical calculators will remain superior to them, because of their physical keys. But as soon as we break free of our human inertia and invent better user interfaces that can only work on tablets, then physical calculators will become obsolete.

I suspect that this idea will be rejected just as was my earlier suggestion that the ubiquitous design of same-shaped keys in a rectangular grid is an idiotic thing to have on calculators (I think that the keys having different shapes and colors would be a much more efficient user interface). But I understand why: it's human inertia that I'm pushing against. "But Joe, that LOOKS funny, so nobody would buy it!" Even if it's faster and easier to use? *sigh* </rant>