Here's a personal opinion

Over all other calcs I have (/ have tried), I'd definitely go with the Nspire CX (CAS) (and if possible, not the J hardware revision -latest at his time-) so that you can try the best of both worlds :
- probably the most advanced, portable, math/science things available with this level of user experience / intuitive-ness. (At this point, the HP Prime is powerful bot not polished enough right now, I believe, for most end-users)
- well, the most powerful apps/games/whatever when using 3.1 with Ndless (native development made possible). While Lua is a big relief for programmers since TI-Basic is a big no-no for programming graphical things (the Basic on the Nspire is pretty much only made for math algorithms, and for that it's great), it's obviously not as powerful as C/ASM.



But over time (and also because I'm now 4 years after High School), I've come to think that using a calculator for gaming is becoming quite obsolete with all the smartphones and such that "everybody" tends to have and use [exceedingly?]. I'll have to say that for the past 3 or even 4 years, I haven't used my calculators for gaming at all. Everytime I used my Nspire, it was for math/science-related purposes. And for that it's particularly adapted (of course !). Before all that, I indeed was programming quite a lot on my 84+ ... during class; but is that still what people do nowadays ? At this time, smartphones didn't exist...

30$ here : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ti-nspire/id590823242?mt=8 and https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ti-nspire-cas/id545351700?mt=8 (non cas and cas, same price)

Soon after the release, during the T3 conference, the price got temporarily lowered to $5 though.

Ah, yeah, 6 chars Indeed, pretty fast

(One could think they'd have put a more difficult password like the ftp one... but nope)

Ah, thanks for the details   (For some potential data editor, would setting these bytes to '0' (or duplicate from a known number) be a bad idea ?)

(For the simulator, I also believed it was on exit, but at several occasions, Windows couldn't see the file as updated... so that's why. No problem with the connectivity kit, though, since saving was manually done)

No, it's "just" a simulator.

Yes, you should try to delete the OS from the maintenance menu, and then, install 3.1.

I do believe that having an actual emulator would be quite (if not extremely) useful.
Maybe taking some parts from nspire_emu could be a good base, considering the processor is pretty much the same.

Some info:
The firmware binairies aren't encrypted (at all). But I guess that the people who know about ARM ASM programming already looked at the .elf files and figured that out ^^

Like on the Nspire, the next step would be to look for flaws (buffer overflow etc.) but again I'll leave that to people who know about this ^^


(BTW, not completely hacking-related, but here is a bit of info about the transfer protocol : http://tiplanet.org/hpwiki/HP_Prime/Linking_Protocol )
In fact it would be cool to have some official documentation of the protocol, from HP. In fact, for TI, TILP (which is especially useful (the only option, in fact) for Linux users) has been made through painful reverse-enginnering through USB sniffing/dumpings. As HP looks more open to the community, maybe they would give the interested people some documentation so that a linking program could be coded for Linux, mainly

The prototype one given on tiplanet is specifically for people who own prototypes and who can't do anything with publicly available things or with another producation, on-the-market, device, because then, dumping would suffice.

But I guess you could ask around directly to some people if they are willing to give it to you. But that might be illegal too, and it definitely would be if yo don't own the device yourself.