The Enhanced Calculator gives Nokia’s normal number-cruncher a welcome upgrade with scientific functions and ease of use tweaks, but does the effort of installing it compute? NokNok finds out.
The very first handheld electronic gizmos, way back in the 1970s, were pocket calculators. In those days, the likes of HP and Texas Instruments vied to make their red LED displays ever brighter, scientific operations ever geekier and even added primitive magnetic tape readers to store basic programs.
Thirty years later and every mobile phone on the market has a calculator built in. Unfortunately, most of them (and this includes Nokia’s current calculator) are good for little more than calculating tips and spelling ‘boobs’ upside down (58008).
The Enhanced Calculator changes all that. For a start, it’s actually three calculators in one: standard, scientific and loan. The standard calculator strips maths down to its bare essentials, with just the most common operators (+,-,/,* and =) on the nav pad so you can split a restaurant bill one-handed, in seconds.
The scientific calculator gets more serious, devoting half the screen to such high-brow functions as 1/x, n!, log, sin/cos/tan, pi and exponentials. It’s easy to scroll through the two lists of functions and to build up more complex expressions by incorporating brackets. Results are shown to 14 significant digits.
The loan calculator is perhaps even more useful in these straightened times. You can enter an APR loan amount, interest rate and term to see your monthly payments, or set your budget and see how many months it will take to pay off that new hybrid.
Enhanced Calculator isn’t powerful enough for real scientists (it lacks graphs and more than one memory location, for a start) but it should be enough to see students through their A-level maths – and hopefully the rest of us through this recession.
Details
Size: 83KB
Price: Free
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