[greydius]

Aside from the color screen and faster processor, these new Nspire calculators have no new features except gimmicky stuff (No one is going to buy a calculator because they need a 2"x2" spreadsheet). Even my TI-89, which I bought in 1999, has the same basic functionality. (Maybe that's why the TI-89's price hasn't changed -- it costs as much as the Nspire CAS). The only truly useful improvement TI has made is a rechargeable battery pack.

[jcrawfordor]

The NSpire OS is significantly more usable than the 83+ and 89 that I went through school with. In one case, I was able to put a dataset acquired from measurements into the spreadsheet editor, run a linear regression, get the r^2 for the regression, then draw the graph of points and line and save it in just a few seconds of menu choices - without ever having done that on an NSpire before. This would have taken me significantly longer on the older models if I hadn't already memorized the procedure.

So I wouldn't say that the NSpire has any radically new features, but I think that it's a lot more approachable then the older models. It feels less like something that you have to specifically learn to use and more like an intuitive software package - which is perhaps what our author is really getting at when they talk about apps.