The situation of the Casio Prizm
Note: this was originally published as part of a post on Cemetech.
The status of 3rd-party development (and general user interest) on what is currently Casio’s flagship non-CAS calculator, is disappointing and inglorious, but the user community is not the only guilty of the situation. I would say there is a marketing problem on Casio’s side: the Prizm is only appealing to students and teachers that are already used to Casio calculators. Personally, I know that if it weren’t for the recommendations of my maths teacher (who is a big proponent of these calculators for their ease of use and similar UX across graphic models), I would have bought a non-CAS Nspire instead, or eventually a black-and-white Casio model.
Despite great initial success (first on Omnimaga and then on Cemetech), the Prizm never really caught on with the developers community and I feel it really never caught on with general students, either. While it is true that the Nspire, and more recently the HP Prime, have more powerful hardware, the first also has a more complex system that actively tries to block 3rd-party binary software, and the second does not have the same target market (the HP Prime doesn’t have a non-CAS version). Cemetech seems to have turned more to the TI-84 Plus CSE, but while it doesn’t have the software constraints of the Nspire, it has inferior hardware specs that put it on another league (I guess it had some success on this community because it was similar to “what people were used to”, i.e. the old TI calculators, unlike the Prizm and the Nspires).
Still, and somehow, the Prizm seems to have a notable market share in Asia, but due to different character sets and more, the western and oriental communities don’t communicate much. From what I understand the Prizm seems to be used in China at a higher education level than in the rest of the world.
From my point of view, the marketing done by Casio for the Prizm, was as simple as saying “we were the first to release a full-color graphic calculator, here it is” and running a few contests while the model was new, but without any effort to distinguish themselves from the competition that would come later (and made a much bigger advertising effort in many markets). Even though they were the first to show a calculator with a full-color, high-resolution screen, while simultaneously being allowed on most official exams, I feel they did not fully explore the possibilities of the screen or the OS and hardware behind it, let alone explain them to users.
On the technical side, many aspects of the OS on the Prizm could have been polished (certain things as the Program editor feel really slow at the default clock speed, as do the constant picture decode and redraws when a g3p is shown on the screen, for example in eActivity). Things such as the separation between a “Main Memory” and “Storage Memory”, while familiar to existing users of Casio systems, are metaphors unused on other computer systems and while technically sound (and allowing for backwards compatibility), are inadequate for a great user experience – I know of people who don’t quite understand why they get memory errors on lists, matrices and Basic programs, even though they have plenty of storage memory, and I also know the problem in understanding different memory sections is common to TI calculators. OS updates never (are yet to?) addressed this, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever address it because it would require major technical changes, perhaps even hardware changes (more RAM or dynamic RAM allocation, anyone?) and the development of a platform that’s not akin to anything built by Casio in terms of calculators, which means users would need to relearn it again – if Casio builds something too much different from previous generations, the results might not be positive (look at how the Nspire went on the TI side).
Then Casio moved on to the new Classpad models (which not everyone can buy, because they are not allowed on all the exams, and not everyone needs a CAS calculator on university), and the Prizm was more or less forgotten. While Casio’s offering has some points that stand out from the competition, it has outdated hardware specs when compared to the other CAS calculators.
Casio calculators become “forgotten” not because the manufacturer stops providing support for them (the Prizm just received the 2.00 OS update, and a new official add-in – so things are well on the contrary), but because there is little effort to publicize these updates to their older models. I guess if they don’t move more, it’s because they are selling and working “good enough” for them. Which isn’t a synonym of things being “good enough” for the power user community.
In my opinion, the Casio calculator development community is too spread among many small communities, which have low levels of activity (especially when it comes to the Prizm) and in some ways even alienate from each other, instead of uniting to get things forward. Note that I’m not suggesting the creation of a new community to hold all the 3rd-party Casio development (see xkcd 927), but instead more communication and joint ventures between existing ones, for example in the form of contests. Unfortunately, different ideas and culture seem to make this difficult most of the time, but it would be great if people managed to overcome that in favor of higher goals.