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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame it has a screen that looks like it came from the turn of the century.

Transflective screens require very little power. You do not want to have to deal with having to recharge or swap the battery every few days!

Surprised you're the only one to point this out. It's a feature, not a bug. It runs for 300 hours off 4 AAA batteries.

Calculators are not exactly premium devices, even though you'd likely think otherwise when you have to buy the anointed model for your kids' school.

That said, Casio is probably churning these things out with a BOM around $5-$10, so you can't really expect much from the display. We're spoiled by our phones, which (weirdly enough) have no single, definitive "good" calculator on either iOS or Android (and can't be used in class anyway).

Graphic calculators are extremely expensive for what they provide (compared to a cheap phone). Only thing holding them up is regulation (ie. being allowed in class and at certain exams), because otherwise, even a cheap phone can emulate a classical calculator (eg. hp 49g for us RPN fans), not to mention more advance tools (from apps to wolfram alpha).

I think a large fraction of what you’re paying for is the interface. Your phone can in theory do a lot more than a calculator, but having dedicated buttons for everything makes a calculator much better suited for its purpose.

Though maybe that’s just because nobody has come up with a great UI concept for a touchscreen calculator.

Right. Please show me one single app with an UI half as good as a bog standard graphing Casio or TI.

I use HP (because i want RPN), and i use this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ab.x48

This one is better for newer models:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.emulator.f...

Yes,i know it's an emulator, but for the same price as a calculator, i get an emulated calculator + a bunch of other stuff, including wolfram alpha, huge database of knowledge online (wikipedia) + of course a phone.

...and on the other hand, i have this always in my pocket.

Come on, £82 is what this calculator costs... You can find Android phones at that price

You are paying because you can take it with you to an exam, period

in some schools phones are allowed for educational purposes only

> have no single, definitive "good" calculator on either iOS or Android

When your device has an app store or allows third party software in some other way it will never have a "single definitive good app" for anything, there will be many bad ones and a maybe a couple of good ones, for math there's this good one: https://github.com/mkulesh/microMathematics

It appears that the FX-CG50, which has a color screen, comes with Python[0] . Still nowhere near the display you would expect on an entry-level mobile phone, but then probably doesn't have the same power draw either.

[0] https://education.casio.co.uk/products/cg50

Casio Classpad fx-cp400 features the biggest display in a graphic calculator (comparable with mobile phones).

Well, its paired with almost equally bad keypad, I so that sort of balances it out. Somehow I don't see writing any meaningful amount of Python on that being particularly comfortable.

You can connect via USB and write programs on your PC and transfer them over if you wish.

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