As announced by
TI-BANK, Datamath has posted pictures of the real TI-Nspire CX calculator models, although per TI's request, they were asked to not show the inside of the calculator yet.
http://www.datamath.org/Graphing/NSpire_CX_P1.htmhttp://www.datamath.org/Graphing/NSpire_CX_CAS_P1.htmhttp://www.datamath.org/Graphing/NSpire_CX_EZ.htmAccording to people who tried the prototypes themselves, the screen is not as dark in person as it was from photos
posted on TI-BANK a few days ago, and even
from weird angles, the calculator screen looks pretty readable:
(image found on TI-BANK forums)The dark screen was most likely due to the calculator pictures being made with a scanner or the back-light being disabled. This means the screen doesn't have the problems some of us feared. Unless it's a passive, blurry LCD like some MP3 players, the screen quality should be on-par with the Casio Prizm.
Also, according to TI-BANK, the OS 3.0 found in prototype models has a size similar to OS 2.1. With nothing installed on the CAS mode, there is about 101.7 MB free. The CAS OS seems to be 13.5 MB large and the regular model one 15.2 MB. We do not know if the TI-84 Plus emulator is included in the latter. If it is, then there is a possibility that both TI-Nspire and TI-Nspire CX models use the same OS file.
Now that we have an idea of how the LCD brightness is and how big the OS is so far, we do hope that battery power usage will have been improved as well. Some people reports that good batteries lasts about two weeks on a TI-Nspire running Ndless programs on a regular basis, while a Casio Prizm running several SH3 assembly programs still use the battery set that came with it when bought 2.5 months ago.
Also it appears the calculator is already for sale for teachers and school at
http://www.calculatrices.ch/Info.cfm?modell=TINCXCASTE&e=1