By Tech Powered Dad | January 14, 2011

Just received an email from marketing at Texas Instruments alerting me that they released a new operating system for the TI-84 plus a couple of days ago. The newest release for the TI-84 is 2.55MP. This new TI-84 OS offers templates (or “wizards” as TI calls them) for statistics features, such as regressions and statistics. The email also said users have the ability to paste these commands back to the home screen so they can be used in other calculations.

I plan on checking out TI-84 2.55MP tomorrow at school, and I’ll post an update on it when I get a chance to try it out firsthand. This sounds like a fairly straightforward update compared to the major overhaul the TI-84 got last year with 2.53MP. Nonetheless, it’s a nice upgrade. Until the latest round of upgrades, the biggest drawback to the TI-84 was the large amount of calculator syntax you had to memorize to use the advanced features. Now, Texas Instruments has almost coded this problem right out of the OS.

It’s also interesting to see that TI continues making significant updates to the TI-84 plus. I thought 2.53 might be the last significant update the TI-84 would see. With the release of 2.55, it looks like the TI-84 might have a much longer lifespan that I would have previously guessed when rumors were recently going around that the TI-84 plus silver edition was being discontinued.

UPDATE 1/14/11

I’ve installed 2.55MP on two different TI-84’s. It was a little buggy each time and took a couple of installation attempts. For now, I’m assuming this has something to do with my specific calculator/computer and not the OS itself. The new OS works as advertised. It’s now much easier to do statistics regressions. Here are a couple of screen caps that demo the differences in the new features.