I'm curious about the LCD.  Is it supposed to use a color palette or individually-controlled RGB pixels? 

We don't know. We probably won't know until an assembly-savvy person gets one and starts dumping code.

I'm a little skeptical that you could get good performance either way

I agree that the vintage Z80 design couldn't provide good graphical performance, but I believe that upping the clock rate and rewriting some of their worst-performing code could provide adequate graphing performance, as in it would take less than ten seconds to graph y=mx+b. We're speculating that an eZ80 could easily provide the performance.

I'm a little skeptical that you could get good performance either way - and I'm even more skeptical that TI could pull it off (these are the same people who brought us MathPrint.)

An eZ80 would easily let them use C, which really makes it more likely they'll be able to implement good functionality, since C is much less specialized that than Z80 assembly. Although, in the end, it'll probably end up being as slow as the original software.

Regarding the speed of this new Z80 calculator, Just wanted to mention that the eZ80, and other potential implementations of this old instruction set don't have to rely on clock speed alone....Some instructions on newer Z80 clones execute the same code in many fewer clock cycles than the original, giving effective comparison speeds well above what simple clock speed multiples would give you.

Assuming that TI is trying to at least competitively match the Prizm, it will have to bench roughly 3 times faster than the current 15 Mhz TI-84.   I have a TI-89, and I can tell you that the Prizm I recently bought is easily 4-6 times as fast as the '89 (in Basic, anyway).  That is what TI has to shoot for....and that should be within reach with the newer Z80 chips.  Available user memory will probably go up as well, well past the 24K currently offered...

I'm pretty sure everyone is just throwing around the eZ80 cause i jokingly said it would be awesome if it had one ;P  Seriously, there's like literally no reason for them to put it in, haha (From TI's viewpoint)

TI gave me an image



(I'll leave the watermark/shadow for now, later will release it "raw", if anyone is interested (for emulators )

go ahead lol

Anyway, I should get more photos (in HD) in january

Cool to hear. I added it although I probably won't post a news news just for the pic. I might wait until there are more infos to post (or someone else posts more info)

Excatly what I will do myself on tiplanet

That mockup image was created in Adobe Illustrator. It's not blurry, it's anti-aliased.

Anyway, this might get taken down, but here's an SVG similar to the above image, and a high-res PNG render of it. The file was extracted from the official TI-30X emulator TI sells to teachers. I'd post the whole .jar file (renamed to .zip so you can explore it), but the attachment limit is 4 MB and the .jar file is 9 MB.