Surprisingly, I'm not the one that sparked the need for me to start this thread. My sister is starting a Calc 1 class and is going to need to buy an Nspire CAS(as per professor requirement, he doesn't want 89's ). However she's currently debating between a clickpad one and one of their newer CX ones.

My question for you guys is if you know if there are any major differences between the CX's OS, and an older Nspire OS for a *casual* calculator user.

You can get OS 3.0x on the older Nspires as well as the CX, btw. The CX has more memory and is faster than the older Nspires, and it has a color screen. It doesn't have any C/ASM support yet, though.

Yea, I was kinda leaning to telling her to get the older one... it's a $100 price difference on Amazon and plus I might try to buy it off her when she's done with it (PROFIT!).

She just wanted to make sure that it would be the same syntax as the CX, as she's unsure if the professor has a CX or the older one. Sounds like they are nearly the same when it comes to TI's intended functions due to the possibility of the same OS. As for programming... not so much.

Thanks for the help!

Get the newer one, it should have C/ASM support at some point, and it already has LUA. That, along with the color and extra speed, makes it the best choice. Although this is just my view on it...

Is there really a $100 price difference? I saw a Nspire CX (not CAS) at Walmart today for $144, and a Nspire Touchpad (not CAS) for $125.

Yea. Amazon has the clickpad nspire cas for like $60. It's a great deal. Seems like amazon has a special deal.

What extra speed, qazz? As far as I'm aware, they used the same processor, just the OS version upped the clock because it was so slow.

All math commands and such should be exactly the same on the old calcs and the CX as long as the same OS version is used, so any of them will work fine.

I was just amazed it has 100Mb of memory. I think the rechargeable battery and color screen are kinda gimmicky at this point though.

And that's what I hope is going to happen JosJuice. Unfortunately... she isn't very experienced when it comes to anything even close to a computer. So I'll probably have to update it. But, $60 compared to $175 for the CX? That's just insane.

The memory is also pretty gimmicky. Math documents don't take up that much space, and you can't really store anything else on Nspires.

A shame your sister's teacher doesn't want the 89T. It's a perfectly capable calculator, and much more programmable than the Nspire is.
It's probably a matter of personal taste, but typing on the TI-Z80 and TI-68k keyboards remains faster than typing on the Clickpad and Touchpad keyboards.


The CAS Clickpad is indeed much cheaper, and for now, the CX (CAS) doesn't have abilities that the Clickpad & Touchpad (CAS) don't have: chances are good that your sister's professor won't be using wireless stuff.
Many people are complaining about the low quality (imprecision, etc.) of the touchpad on Touchpad & CX Nspires.

true, very true...

Well, either way, I would still get the CX, because, assuming you want a little more from your calc, if a CX version of ndless comes out, the increased memory could be useful, ROMs for gbc4nspire do take up much more space than regular documents.

Of course, this is assuming you want to use the nspire for more than Math. If you want just math, and nothing else, I guess the regular nspire is what you want.

that sucks he does not want a 89T, it is probably my second best calculator I own

That's correct, but it's mostly because no one really wants an Nspire. I renamed this topic, by the way; "debacle" doesn't mean "debate". It's more like "fiasco". And qazz, where did you come up with the Nspire having legitimate C/ASM support? I seriously doubt TI will ever allow it.

I never meant legitimate C/ASM support, I meant ndless C/ASM support (although that is not here yet for the latest OS.... it should be in the furture)

Well, if all goes well with my SD Card mod, you will never lack for space again. up to 2TB theoretically, although the largest you can get nwo is only 64-128 GB. (They're in the SDXC standard)

Well Kerm, it was kinda a fiasco for her... But she ended up getting the clickpad Nspire. Had I needed to buy one, I might have just gone CX, but I'll likely just buy the Nspire off her later. My 89T and 84SE work for now.

Qazz & Lionel: Could not agree with you more. My 89T has saved me on countless occasions. Had it not been for the many tests that ban it, I would have considered getting rid of my 84. Well, not exactly, but you catch my drift. Just wish it had as much of a following as the z80 calcs.

Sorry if anyone views this as threadjacking, but is the CAS capability of the Nspire CAS better or worse than the Ti-89T?

You mentioning a professor requiring an Nspire makes me wonder if it's actually any better than the 68k CAS calculators.

According to him, he said that the Nspire CAS had more features vs the 89. I've used an Nspire CAS for a whopping 10 minutes, and it really didn't seem like it had any other features over the 89. Although I've heard overall that the Nspire CAS is a bit more user friendly.

As for a definitive answer, ask someone who knows more.

If you want to get the CX simply because of the memory size and th color screen, don't get it unless you're planning to put some time into program development on it. If it's solely for math, get the non CX. $100 isn't worth gimmicky features.

Depending on how one looks at things, the CAS in the Nspire ("Phoenix") is better or worse than the CAS in the TI-68k series ("AMS"):
* Phoenix seems to have several math functions that AMS doesn't have, but nothing major indeed; several bugs of Bhuvanesh Bhatt's bug list seem to have disappeared (but in Phoenix 3.0.1.1753, many bugs have appeared, though they seem to have been fixed in 3.0.2.1971);
* AMS can be programmed in native code (C/ASM), while Phoenix cannot. I have released a PoC that shows that the API hasn't changed, but further reverse-engineering work is required to make the PoC remotely useful: we don't know how to access variables in documents...