By Tech Powered Dad | September 7, 2011
Just got off the phone with a customer service representative at Texas Instruments headquarters in Dallas. I was trying to get help for a problem with press-to-test mode that’s plagued several of my students’ calculators already this year. Basically, taking the calculator out of press-to-test mode can, in some cases, cause a bootup error (you will know it if you see it by a triangle with an exclamation point). I’ve seen this happen three times so far this school year, always to older grayscale Nspires on OS 3.0, never to the Nspire CX.
The product rep told me that although he could not promise it, TI is hopeful the release of TI-Nspire OS 3.1 will prevent this problem in the future. He also said that OS 3.1 is being released today.
Since I wrote this article about an hour ago, OS 3.1, or more specifically TI-Nspire 3.1.0.392, was released on the Texas Instruments website. I have it running on a TI-Nspire CX, and, insofar as I can tell, it looks pretty much the same as TI-Nspire 3.0. According to the TI website, the changes from version 3.0 to 3.1 were to add support for TI-Navigator for networked computers, increased battery performance when using the lab cradle, and “general improvements to TI-Nspire functionality.”