The Role of the Graphing Calculator in 2021 and Beyond

[Han]

A smartphone is light years beyond a calculator in terms of computing power. However, the lack of a keyboard means a good chunk of the screen real estate would be (temporarily?) taken up by a virtual keyboard. Then there is the issue of academic integrity when one has the internet and instant messaging at one's fingertips. In an ideal world where those issues are in fact non-issues, students would simply speak into their phones, which connect to a Maple or Mathematica server licensed by the school, and get their results in seconds and thus eliminate the need of a keyboard.

The HP Prime and its contemporaries provide a great middle ground between computations by hand and having desktop/server mathematical software at one's fingertips.

Regarding professionals, I'm don't really see much of a market for graphing calculators given that smart phones have apps for things like data collection, computations (both symbolic and numeric), and can easily interface with other devices due to common interfaces like USB or WiFi. And if smartphones are insufficient, there are tablets, laptops, and of course ordinary desktops. Those graphing calculators would have to lean more towards duplicating features of a smartphone, at which point they may as well just be smartphones. They only "feature" that smartphones these days do not have are dedicated physical keyboards, which -- depending on use-cases -- may make a difference for professionals.