Card slots would be excellent for adding functionality. Just think about it: Programmers and users will have all the megabytes they want at a fair price AND the hardware people will have a powerful interface for awesome stuff like the CF or SD camera, wireless cards, card modem... the possibilities are virtually limitless.

Of course, making the calc faster would be necessary to take full advantage of it. :)

Card modem...probably not but they do make a CF WiFi card.

Why would you pick extra internal memory when you could get arbitrarily large external memory in the form of CF?
Not to mention that a CF slot would let you interface to other devices...

Like the camera :) And the phone! And my wireless, free, internet connection! (w00-h00!)

How 'bout TI adding say BMP, GIF, and JPG format compatability. And duh, you do need a color screen.

Well... you could have black/white dithers. But they never look as good :( There are those picture viewers out there...

Screw color screen. You don't need that when you have greyscale capability. I'd prefer a high resolution screen with lots off memory so that you can easily support 32 level greyscale stuff.

32 shades of gray? Can the human eye see that many at that scale?

8 is plenty if you ask me... The Game Boy has only 4 shades and it is pretty good.

Yeah, I've seen 32-level grayscale for the 86. It's probably so flickery that you can't tell them from each other.

High greyscale movie clips really juice out your batteries on a TI-86. I played the Master Chief from Halo clip with 32 level greyscale for 30 seconds and it chewed out 2% of my batteries. I used System Moniter by Kirk Meyer BTW.

I'd assume 32-level grayscale would be pretty battery-intensive.

Saying things like "the human eye" is just plain stupid. Some people's eyes are better at color differentiation than others. Besides, most people can easily differentiate between over 64 shades of gray.

Ok, to clarify: On those flickering little dots...

The only problem with that is TI would need to make a LCD screen with a higher contrast ratio. Right now it is not even 100:1, more like 16:1. The higher the ration the more shades it will support.

I said absolutely nothing about a calculator.

Just making my own reference to something TI should fix...

You said "The only problem with that is TI would need to make a LCD screen with a higher contrast ratio." The "that" you are referring to is my statement that the average human eye can see about 64 shades of gray. Your comment was not an independent thought, but a qualifier placed on something I stated in my previous comment.

IU'm not in the mood for arguing, but since this is a calculator site and the subject was started over the # of colors that can be seen on a calculator screen it is a logical assumption that the comment you made was in reference to the calculator LCD.

That's not a logical conclusion at all. That's the same as being in the middle of a political rally and telling your friend, "I have to use the restroom"... and then being asked "Why, to be able to hear the speakers better?"

all I was talking about was a physical capability of the average human eye. The fact that I mention 64 shades of gray should lead you to further suspect that I'm not talking about calculators, since none of them can *do* that.

How about faster processor and better screen resolution?

I'd pick that

Me too.

When you say better screen resolution, are we making the pixels smaller, or increasing the size of the calc? If the pixels get too small, you won't be able to read small text very well.

resolution also means the amount of pixels, not just lowering the size. I would have picked more speed and res for my choice, isn't a camera rather useless without a high-res colour screen?

Yeah... I just meant that if they were to change to it.... say, 320x240, they'd most likely increase the screen size as well to fit the extra pixels in (like they did with the TI-92/+)

Just because the pixils get smaller doesn't mean the text gets smaller. Besides, it would be better for displaying things like circles - they would look more round.

Well, I meant....

If you have a 4x6 font, it would appear smaller on the better resolution screen. On the TI-82, is very easy to read. On the TI-89, it's hard to read. On a very good resolution, it would be VERY hard to read.

Well then I guess they will have to change the pattern of each character then.