I think the main issue is offer/demand. Nintendo has an history of selling their consoles cheaper on launch. I remember the N64 for example. However, since they become very popular their price won't drop as fast. I remember the 360 was like $300 cheaper 3 years after launch, and today the Wii only dropped by about $60 over here (compared to the launch price).

Yes, the price of the 360 has changed a lot relative to the prices of other consoles.

Maybe Nintendo has cheaper hardware for the price ratio, but it doesn't mean their consoles are bad. They're just for a different group of people.

Which is pretty much what I said in my previous post. Only problem is that's not a very good excuse to use relatively crappy components to make more money.

However, something seems wrong with your image above: Where I live the 360 costed about $700 on launch, not $300. Was it really this cheap in USA when it came out?

Only if you could find one.

I think TI is much more worse than Nintendo on the hardware/ratio point, and on the TI-Nspire, less freedom.

Yes, TI has worse price/value ratios than Nintendo, but the Wii and DS are far more locked down then the Nspire. There is no Wii-BASIC or anything like it.

Also personally as much as I wish the CX screen was a lot larger, I would rather have it so it's small enough to allow the calc to fit in a pocket. I feel the TI-Nspire is too huge, compared to the Prizm.

This is simply a matter of personal preference, there isn't anything to discuss here.

Also, if the resolution was larger I would surely hope the text is still readable. If they decided to use a 720x480 LCD, but the entire text was 8 px fonts, it would hurt our eyes. I already find the text small enough on the Nspire Clickpad and the TI-89T.

Fortunately, this would not be an issue. The iPhone 4's display has a very high pixel density, and yet it is one of the clearest and easiest to read displays in use. The problem you're referring to is merely a font size issue. I believe that is somewhat adjustable on the Nspire.

Anyway I guess everyone got their opinions, but in your earlier comment, mikehill2003, it sounded like you were totally against a color screen and the way the rest was worded it seemed like you were against calc dev and thought they were reserved only for math.

No, I think a color screen is a great thing, but TI uses it as a shield against the Nspire's other problems (such as the weak CPU). As in "Look, our new TI-Nspire CX has a shiny color screen!" "I see. Does it use a modern 800Mhz CPU yet?" "Look, the ability to draw graphs onto images will revolutionize teaching!"

I'm not against calc game dev at all. I personally don't have enough free time right now to do it, but I fully appreciate the effort that goes into calc games. Features that make a calculator great for game development, like a great screen, plenty of memory, and good programming support also make it great for serious things like mathematics.

We need to be careful about how we word stuff and also some people are more sensitive so if they arrive with a CX or a Prizm and you go tell them this calc is worthless because of the hardware they might think you are telling them they're worthless.

I agree, but don't consider any decent calculator worthless, much less its owner.

And one thing to remember is that Omnimaga doesn't welcome fanboyism towards consoles, OSes, browsers, languages, etc, so we have to be careful to make sure what we say doesn't sound like it comes from a fanboy.

Don't worry, I'm not really a fanboy of any kind. I care far more about an individual product's worth on its own then the company or philosophy that led to its development. In other words, I'd gladly sell my iPod if someone made a faster and cheaper Android alternate.

I suppose in theory if you could replace the flash chip with a larger one, then you could use the space beyond the filesystem (current boot2's and OSes have hard-coded the filesystem area to end at 32MB, although this may change when OS 3.0 comes out because the CX will have a 128MB flash chip). I don't think there are many of us who could do that, though :p

On the CAS+ nspires replacing the NAND wouldn't be too hard, but for the production nspires you would need some expensive equipment.

I just don't like the direction TI is taking with what started out as a tool. Whats next, music playback and facebook integration? Maybe the CX2 will use twitter and Wolfram Alpha? (And lack a trig key and a Pi key)

TI is too much like Nintendo, they make overpriced and locked down products from crappy, outdated components.

Out of curiosity, has anyone taken a look at the filesystem formats yet?

Not yet, but it's on my list.

TI didn't use a standard filesystem like FAT, instead they used a proprietary filesystem called Datalight Reliance. This basically means we have to rely on TI's OS code to do file access (making ports of other OS's, such as Linux, somewhat difficult)

I see. Thanks for clearing that up, I guess I'll add that to my list of things that need to be done.

So would the asm code for fread from boot2 help you?

Though, I've heard programming wise, nothing is better supported than HP calcs... If only THEY were the popular ones...

True, at least in my experience. It was a lot easier to make software for the HP-50g then it was for the TI-89, and I'm still trying to figure out the nspire.

Except an actual computer

True, but I've yet to see a class where you can use a laptop on a test.

Here's something from HP's site:

http://www.hp.com/calculators/resellers/canada.html

I didn't see any in-store retailers in Canada there that sell the 50g.

Nah they no longer sells HP/Casio calcs.

Well that explains it. I guess the greedy stores care more about selling lots of crap then selling quality products at a reasonable price, just like in most of the US.

The funny thing about it is that for math it's way better then the TI-89 Titanium (I own both, so I do know) and also $50 cheaper in stores. If only it had a better screen (It's about as bad as the 84+ emu on the nspire).