Ti-nspire Touchpad Keypad Review

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(More customer reviews)I've used several different types of TI Calculators: A basic scientific calculator in elementary school (TI-30x), a TI-84 Silver Edition for Algebra and Geometry, and the TI-Nspire for Algebra 2 and Pre-calculus. When I recently got online and saw that TI had released the new touchpad keypad along with the new Nspire calculators, I ordered the new keypad right away. After all, this new keypad has a touchpad, so it must be great... right?
Wrong. It first must be noted that the touchpad is likely the best part of this new keypad. The touchpad functions reasonably well, only occasionally freezing up. There is a small rivet in the middle of the touchpad, which sometimes causes interference (this is also the only area in which you can tap the keypad to click, evidently they could not spread this feature to the other few inches of the touchpad). If you enjoy manipulating graphs by dragging various lines to different places and watching the numbers change... then you will probably enjoy using the touchpad. However, the touchpad is useless for doing the usual calculations. As would be expected, using the keys on the calculator is much faster for navigating the various menus on the Nspire.
Calculators generally have the same layout. The numbers are arranged in the same order; the plus sign appears under the minus sign, the minus sign under the multiplication sign, and the multiplication sign under the division sign. The makers of this new keypad seemed to feel the need to change this... The results, well, just look at the image of the keypad. These operations now appear side by side in groups of two (so if you're used to the traditional layout, it's quite annoying). In fact, they have rearranged a lot of the buttons on this new keypad, some of which include:
1. Instead of the traditional SIN, COS, and TAN buttons appearing, there is now just one button labeled 'trig'. Which means if you want to use TAN, you now must press the 'trig' button three times and then press enter. It takes even more button presses to reach the inverse TAN (of course, if you care to spend even more time you can select this using the touchpad)!
2. The original Nspire keypad had 16 round gray buttons. This meant simple one button access to the imaginary number, the heavily used value pi, various punctuation marks, etc. This new keypad has just 6 round gray keys, meaning you will need to press more keys to get to the same symbols you could access with just one or two keys on the original keypad. To use pi now requires two presses, the imaginary number and theta: three.
3. And perhaps the biggest move is that all of the alphabet keys now appear at the bottom of the keypad. This means a few things: (1)If you were finally improving your Nspire typing skills, this keyboard is a different width than the original Nspire keypad. (2)The keys are now even more cramped together, making it uncomfortable to type. Those with large fingers might have trouble typing. (3)The shift key appears in a completely separate area than the keypad, not very handy.
And now a few comments regarding how the keys feel when pressing them:
1. The alphabet keys make a loud and annoying clicking noise when pressed.
2. The round gray buttons also make the same annoying clicking noise.
3. The remaining white keys, the enter, ctrl, shift, var, and del keys all feel about the same to press as the original Nspire keypad keys (thankfully).
4. The remaining black keys (the ones in groups of two) require little to no force to press at all and make hardly any noise compared to the rest of the keys. The difference in the force required to press down on these black keys verses the white number keys is quite annoying when making calculations.
Overall, this is not a good keypad upgrade. If you're used to using the first Nspire keypad, it has much better functionality, so there is no reason to switch to this keypad. The only functionality advantage (besides the touchpad) this keypad has over the original is the button which allows you immediate access to the Scratchpad (which seems to be a relatively pointless function that was added to OS 2.0). If they had simply added the touchpad to the original keypad it would have been a great upgrade, but they didn't.
One last note, this keypad does come with a free registration code for the TI-Nspire Student software, so if you're interested in that, then this may be worth the price.

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TI-Nspire Touchpad Keypad

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