Can we interest you in a $10 pocket calculator powered by Android 9? A Chinese vendor is offering a pocket calculator that runs a full copy of Android 9 – complete with Wi-Fi. It costs ¥69, about 10 bucks. Want to feel old? The calculator – not a scientific one, note – is powered by a quad-core Arm chip and runs Android 9, just to provide plain standard calculator functionality. That's what is …
"Why haven't HP / TI done this about a decade ago?"
Which part? They didn't build an Android-powered calculator because their calculators turn on instantly and last a long time on batteries, which this one isn't going to do. Use generic software for calculations? There's not a great answer to that other than wanting to keep charging more for the ones with the buttons and software for more complicated calculations to sell to students that are required to have a specific one for tests and people who got attached to a specific layout and do not want any buttons to change function ever. Either way, their incentive is to change as little as possible until they can no longer sell their calculator, and a calculator you can't easily buy which doesn't natively support many functions isn't going to make them stop.
Romans used a decimal abacus for arithmetic, or foreign accountants (who used an abacus). See Greek ones that used stones in grooves, hence calculator and calculus comes from the Roman for pebble:
The word calculus is Latin for "small pebble" (the diminutive of calx, meaning "stone")
Other peoples at the time had better systems for writing numbers.
>Why else would the posts suggesting 'sending data to china' have downvotes?
Its more about dehumanizing a people than bothering whether 'they' are interested in some meaningless data. This sort of reference suggests that someone's been on a diet of KoolAid.
Also a minor geographical detail. Not everyone who is Chinese is from the PRC.The PRC itself is about the size of Europe with Bejing (maybe we should still call it Peking?) tucked in the north west. There's about 16 different ethnic groups, various languages and so on. Its a society of great age that, among other things, churns out about 35000 engineering graduates a year. We really ought to take the place seriously even if our politicians don't --- or can't.
"It seems that El Reg has some Chinese agents active tonight. Why else would the posts suggesting 'sending data to china' have downvotes?"
I didn't give any of the downvotes, but I have an idea. Maybe because it's ridiculous. For one thing, it's a calculator. How many people who aren't planning to hack their calculator get one, turn it on, verify that it can do calculations, then go into a completely different part of the interface and give it WiFi credentials? Unless you give it a connection, it won't be able to send any data to anybody. Also, it is going to get some numerical input, and that's it, so where is the useful data coming from? I recently typed the following digits into a calculator: 3604.59/(40*8). Anyone who can correctly explain why I wanted the result to that calculation from no other context gets a free upvote. Since it's based on an earlier calculation, it's a bit unfair. Here's another one you can try: 3*261*7.
I'm sure there's a lot of pointless code in there, and it's theoretically possible that it's designed in a malicious way, though it's not likely, given that spamming these out to anyone who wants a relatively poor calculator isn't a great targeting system. Even if it was, it's not going to focus on spying on user's calculations. It has WiFi not because there's a secret plan, but because the parts they had sitting around supported WiFi, so if they're going to try to make a calculator out of them, it's also going to have the hardware.
"I recently typed the following digits into a calculator: 3604.59/(40*8). Anyone who can correctly explain why I wanted the result to that calculation from no other context gets a free upvote. Since it's based on an earlier calculation, it's a bit unfair. Here's another one you can try: 3*261*7."
The question is incorrect since the answer should, of course, be 8008135.
Neither is salary related, but you're on a good track for the 261 which is the number of weekdays in a year (close enough, anyway). The 40, however, is something completely different. Which bolsters my point that the input to a calculator isn't much use to someone who wants to know what I'm doing unless they also take in other data about what the calculation means, which this basic app doesn't appear to do.
Hacking the calculator by itself wouldn't be interesting by itself, unless you consider it's an entry point to all the network.
Anyway, it doesn't hurt to connect all these things to a distinct client Wi-Fi network. Separating them from your computer is a good approach.
I see the gag, and I don't want to encourage it but...
The features in calculators just keep multiplying for the price of the square root of fuck all. I can see why this is divisive. Sorry to go off on a tangent, but where can I get a tomato for £19? I'm asking for a friend because he'd like to garnish his platter of black truffle with a few shavings.
Windows calculator actually does phone home. I think it's just a data fetish at this point.
No, it does not. You should have read the thread your linked to more carefully :
"Keylogger is a huge stretch. The function you are talking about collects invalid input and writes it to a log. Which has not been seen to go anywhere. You would have to enter in your password into the calculator. This is NOT a keylogger a keylogger is a malicious program that secretly records all keyboard input. This only logs input that is entered into the program. Which I hate to tell you there are a lot of programs that do this at some level to make sure errors aren't thrown unless they are supposed to.
Exactly that. Why design a board when you can buy someone else's and take advantage of their economies of scale?
If it's just a case of writing an app and running it on a bought in board which runs Android or Linux, so long as it makes a profit, job done.
All of the 'dementia clocks' I have seen appear to be repurposed digital picture frames running alternative firmware. I even found one with multiple USB, SD, HDMI, audio and AV sockets, IR sensors and stereo speakers. All doing nothing of course.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Obviously, now that everyone has realised having TikTok on their phones is a security risk and they are removing it from government phones Chinese spies need another way. I guess there are millions of people in China saying things like... "Look, look... he has just multiplied Pi by the diameter of the Earth. He must be calculating trajectories for missiles."
Unfortunately for them, the government ministers they gave the calculators to are just using it to count up the commission they are making on their dodgy deals on PPE and subsidies for their owners.
Sorry... I meant "subsidies for their important British industrial partners".
Clearly, it doesn't. It also doesn't need Android, but it has that too. My guess: either they had an engineer who was bored and tried putting together some hardware to see what would happen, or they had a bunch of spare parts they wanted to get rid of.
I say that, but some Chinese companies appear to make a business out of combining things that don't really need combining and selling them. I don't know how often this works for them, but I've seen enough examples where I say "Why would anyone need that", and then sometimes later "You know, that could be more useful than it sounded". I try to avoid buying too much cheap junk, so I tend not to buy them anyway, but there are times where I come to the conclusion that some amalgamation of features isn't as daft as it sounded at first.
It doesn't need Android, but these days as dumb as it might seem, if somebody wanted to make a pretty touchscreen calculator, it's probably much cheaper to build a little board around a generic cheap SoC and give it an entire OS to run...
...than to design any custom silicon and create firmware for it.
...and some are have a small solar cell in the case good enough to run of the lights in the room, never mind actual daylight and therefore don't even need batteries.
(And no, I don't care that it doesn't work in the dark. I can't see the keyboard or display in the dark anyway!!)
Indeed. I was all set with scientific calculators back in 1981-1983, and I don't think they had solar cells on them back then (at least not on scientific ones).
Not a massive problem when I had to put perhaps two new sets of batteries in it since 1981 (my FX-502P).
But my Casio MX-8 does indeed have a small solar cell. I don't even know where the battery is on that one.
Our local recycling center has a "gift shop" where people leave items of possible interest to somebody else. A few months back, I found an HP-15C there, in quite good condition. Started it up, and it worked Just Fine. (I gather they're noted for long battery life.)
A bit before that, I got a Versalog slide rule at Goodwill. No battery issues at all with that...
> Why a Calculator needs WiFi?
So it can look up the supermarket prices for apples and decide if Asok should give Nish seven of them today or whether arbitrage via the international smoothies market would lead to overall better second quarter returns.
"Lucy is on the train from Temple Meads, travelling at 78mph. Susi is standing at the Box Tunnel entrance..."
Ok, this one is trickier, luckily the toaster is also on WiFi.
Hey, this isn't a real third-world country like America, you know! (where the max train speed, apart from Acela, is a miserable 79 mi/h)
Brunel engineered the GWR far better than that (even if the regent government for England later cheaped out on the electrification and stupidly didn't put the wires up all of the way to Temple Meads).
I have a "free" tablet that I got with a magazine subscription. Given the magazine is sold less than the cover price, and posted directly to me, I'm not sure where money is being made, but one of the incentives was a little tablet.
Ten inch LCD screen, 2GB memory, 16GB Flash with SD card and headphone socket. Runs Android Go edition. It's some sort of Allwinner quad core chip driving it. It isn't particularly fast, but it's perfectly capable of Google Docs for writing stuff, and given that I'm short sighted, the thing is a good size to sit in bed watching Netflix (in the standard resolution, but the screen is 1280x800 or something so anything else would be pointless). Okay, it takes about a minute to get going, but once it's playing it works fine.
So I could definitely see a little "calculator" being an interesting toy, once it's been tweaked to be able to load custom apps. Hmm, small and cheap and has WiFi. Aircrack?
You might have got a $12 phone then, but you probably can't now, this side of the Great Trade Wall. Expect the same thing to happen in other technologies.
Still, I expect to see someone on here in a few months who has built a Beowulf cluster out of Chinese calculators and is using it to power their Stargate.
"You might have got a $12 phone then, but you probably can't now, this side of the Great Trade Wall."
You can, but you shouldn't. You can find phones for very cheap, but they'll conveniently omit certain important information like what frequencies they support. This means that they can sell you a 2G/3G device they didn't manage to sell in 2010 and you got what you asked for, or in the slightly better case that you have one that only supports LTE bands from a country you're not in (usually China but sometimes it's one designed for somewhere else and could be entirely unpredictable). Either way, you can put your SIM in it and the chances are very high that nothing will work.
As for Android devices, you can have those cheap as well, as long as you don't mind getting one from 2014 running Android 4.2 on 4 GB of flash stuffed with bloatware some of which doesn't run anymore, and some of which still does work which is a bad sign. Nothing about the device will be good, but you can load FDroid on it and most of the apps there will run on it. If you're willing to increase your asking price, there are various other gradations of slightly better but still generally bad on offer until you get to the level where the phone is actually good and the price is similar to what another budget phone brand would be charging. You can have anything you want at any price you want as long as you're willing to get something crap if you pay too little.
My code review comments are mainly about memory use and performance. our application requires 10s of GB for large data sets which leads some developers to not worry about wasting 10s or 100s of MB. But with that attitude you would soon blow up the required memory from all the accumulated waste.
Well, if it runs Android and has a touchscreen, why didn't they release it as a cut down Android tablet - and include a calculator app.
My last scientific calculator purchase was a £1 model from Poundland, and perfectly decent it is too. I just did a quick search, and it's still available there at that price.
> why didn't they release it as a cut down Android tablet - and include a calculator app.
If it is sold as "an android device" it will face a barrage of angry users complaining - quite rightly - that it won't run this free app, or doesn't even let them download the app in the first place.
Even at this price, it's probably a piss-poor Android device in today's terms.
BUT if you sell it on the basis of something it *can* do - just run the simplest calculator app, which was probably in the ROM anyway, then buyers get what they were offered, everyone is happy (especially the manufacturer who had a warehouse to clear out). If a purchaser happens to be able to figure out it can do more, that is just extra jam on top for them.
You are coming at it from the p.o.v. of the jam on top guy - the target market (which is too posh a term for this sort of thing) is old Mr Bloggs who spots it, thinks it would a fine thing to use on his market stall; he saw the same scientific calculator you did and just worried about hitting the wrong key, what is all that "ln" junk anyway?
I used to visit an HSC Electronics surplus store regularly. They had a lot of typical industrial leftovers, and there was always an overpriced server rack bent beyond repair. Every once in a while a shelf of a mysterious product would appear. They would be completely unused, no branding, dirt cheap, and usually had no controller ROM. They were prototypes and gadgets that failed to ever reach market. Those are what I was looking for.
These calculators sound like exactly that. Somebody must have purchased them for next to nothing and gotten them working.
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Apart from people using them for tinkering around, I see one demographic they might find a dodgly use for these devices, with with students who fancy a go at cheating in their exams. After all while phones might not be allowed to be used in examination conditions at first glance it just looks like a calculator, which are usually allowed. if was loaded with reference documentation, or even connected to the internet via WiFi through a hotspot on your phone, it could well prove to be an advantage to that student over their classmates.
Sounds like some decent competition for traditional "graphical calculators"... Though the ability to run a full mobile OS means it's out of the question in an exam hall environment.
I always used to begrudge people turning up to exams with a graphics calculator having advantages over those that did not.
Of course real world you DO have access to cheap computers (and search engines) and therefore daft memory tests are poor measures of ability.
I miss my HP 48GX with the game Columns played sideways, fully customizable universal Remote Control that used the IR transceiver, and an Italian version of Poker, plus a full blown text editor.
Taking a break from thermodynamics lessons and reading "Doppia Coppia": priceless.
All of it from 3x AAA batteries that lasted months, the best keyboard ever devised for a portable device, and a monochrome LCD.
My college didn't demand the Texas Instruments equivalent, it was agnostic, but people chose the HP48GX due familiarity from the brand and easy to find on the grey market.
As others have said, you want the calculator to be available when you want to use it without having to worry about charging or the battery.
I have an HP28C which is a good calculator, and i also have an HP42C which is one of the best calculators i have ever had.
The latest HP calculator i have is the HP33S, and used infrequenctly, the buttons are beginning to fail - not the usual HP quality.
There were multiple aspects that HP calculators always exhibited, which was quality, and the benefit of Reverse Polish Notation. No other calculator manufacturers offer RPN, which is a shame.
HP seem to have dropped the ball on calculators, as they have removed the older reviews, where the quality of the product has declined.
There is also a lack of products, where they seem to focus on financial calculators which offer RPN.
Given todays capability, it should be easy to offer a robust, high quality calculator with RPN, and provide a touch screen too, where it offers a view of the last 4 registers, and touch screen can be used to move the calculations/values between registers.
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