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Watch Good Old Android 1.6 Cupcake Running on a Calculator

June 23, 2015

Just in case you’ve been too spoiled by the colourful Lollipop, this is to remind you how far we’ve come

While Texas Instruments may have exited the mobile processor market and is concentrating on its past strengths like electronic calculators, it looks like besides devices like the Moto 360 smartwatch, we will still be hearing a bit about it. At least in nerd forums where little moments of magic happen. Eer, like managing to boot good old Android 1.6 Cupcake on a calculator.

See, I used a Casio FX-82MS throughout my high school. While there were better scientific calculators that the cool kids could be spotted with, that was the approved one and just about anything else was an abomination. While it had its own miniscule power bases, that monochrome display meant the only magic it could do was displaying fractions and some other things that today’s basic entry level Android smartphone has for dessert.

See what @joshumax managed to come up with on a TI Nspire CX graphing calculator:

The Nspire CX has a 3.2 inch, 320 x 240 pixel display, 100 MB internal storage (not 9 variable memories like my hapless Casio FX-82 MS), 64 MB RAM and a 150 MHz ARM-based processor.

In case you thought there were places where the Android flashaholics couldn’t get to then you were wrong. The only limiting factors happen to be the specifications but as the above proves, these can easily be overcome if you can easily access older versions of Android and you have time to spare modding things.

He deserves that cookie anyway.