Survey posted 2005-03-08 16:41 by Jon.

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Think about It, the calcs would be heavier. Also, it would be a lot harder to use in class with all the noise. that, or headphones. How about battery life, It would drain batteries fairly fast too. Oh well

although that would be nice to hear something from your calculator once in a while, you are right in that there are more disadvantages. the sound quality wouldn't be too great with the limited RAM too.

on a side note, why is there always a weird question in these polls like "Speakers, what are those?"?

They make it more interesting (especially when people select them).

It wouldn't be that much heavier - just use a piezo element. How else could you easily listen to mobileTunes songs? :D

In a GameBoy Color (which is smaller than a TI-83 Plus), the speakers don't weigh it down too much.

Uh, no, I was talking about the extra survey options.

I think at most a headphone jack. Speakers would just get us all in trouble at school!

It basically already has that - you just need a 2.5 <--> 3.5 mm adapter. And you can very easily mod a full-size jack into the case.

I had my TI-83 and some headphones taken up at school because I was showing one of my friends about the possibilities of TI calculators, but my teacher quickly realized that it was my calculator and had entertainer on it.

You couldn't listen to songs if you only had like, at the most, a meg of memory.

Chances are it would be more useful for game sound effects and current MIDI-like calc music.

The RAM's not the problem. The CPU speed is. If we had a faster CPU, we could get better quality sound. (out of the linkport, that is) That, and songs get huge real fast. :(

Exactly. The cpu speed is the major factor that makes good quality music virtually impossible. Even full-duplex stereo is impossible. :(

I think he wast talking about how the low amount of ram would prevent higher data rates. But yea, CPU and RAM are the important things. But I think in the future they're going to have small harddisk drives in calculators for mass storage. And then....your phone will have more graphing calculator functions.....and then....you'll have a device that is everything in one.

i think a reason calculators don't have hard disks is because you could wipe your Archive everytime you passed near a magnetic field.

I don't see how the calculator could be very much heavier... The speakers on CD players are very light and can emit enough sound to be heard across a room if up loud enough. I also dont think it would be hard to handle in class.. There should be an on/off flag in the RAM to set whether sound is played or not.. not too hard to implement.

Plus I wouldn't be allowed to use it in exams since any calculators with Audio are banned. Anything with inbuilt speakers tends to lose credibility when the speakers are utilized at a poor quality.

Yes, only if i could control the volume.

Heh, why didn't I think of that?

Hmm... I'm thinking they shouldn't have built-in speakers though it is fun to play sound on your calculator. Though I think once they get the capability to play noise, you can't use them on standardized tests. (They could be a potential distraction) Also, I can just imagine playing a game in class and having the calc screw up and crash causing some random noise to start coming out of the speakers. I've seen weirder crashes that do funky things with the display, I imagine if it can do that, it could also spit out random noise, which would really suck if you were in class.

that's a good point, but what if their is a head phone jack? the RAM would a be a big problem, too :(