When I was in the sixth grade, my parents purchased for me a TI-86 graphing calculator. I recall that it was purchased on the same day that "Titanic" on DVD went on sale in the United States. In the years that followed I learned that although the device is advertised as a graphing calculator, it really is a pocket-sized portable computer. It has a stripped-down implementation of the BASIC language and can be programmed in an assembler language as well (although I was nowhere near ready to do that). It even had primitive network functionality. Also, I once read that it uses the same microprocessor as the original Nintendo Gameboy. I reluctantly threw my TI-86 out last year after the display quit. How many devices that you buy today can you keep for 10 years or more before they're useless?
Consider where Nintendo has gone with their line of "Gameboy" products and compare it to where TI has gone with their line of graphing calculators. There has been very little improvement. What the hell, TI? I've been thinking this for many years before I found my thoughts expressed at this link.
Anyhow, as this is a questions and answers site, I have two questions in mind?
1) What the hell, TI? Did you just get complacent because everyone was using your pocket calculators for the SAT and people still buy them? I, for one, will never buy another TI calculator if you don't keep up with the times.
2) What choices do I have now if I wish to have a nice pocket-sized computer that will primarily crunch numbers and draw graphs for me? The TI-86's graphic feature was nice in it's time, but what I really liked about it was being able to input a sequence of operations and see the whole thing on the screen, as opposed to just one number at a time like many scientific calculators. Is there something out there designed with computation in mind that would be technologically on par with say, a Nintendo DS?