A friend of mine at work has an aging TI-92 – it’s a massive beast, and makes me remember just how obsessed we all were with graphing calculators back in college. There’s no truly equivalent app that replicates that sort of computational power in the various app stores that I am aware of (I looked for something akin to that for my iPod Touch, but no luck). Even a simple math scripting app, like SpeQ (sort of a mini-Matlab), would be a huge quantum leap in usability. I wonder if I am just missing something? I’d probably pay quite a bit of money for the ability to replicate the sophisticated graphing calc power of old on my iPod (and it would probably do even better in the iPad).
This is what would literally turn iPads into Padds overnite.
You may be missing Apple’s app policy. At least with the iPhone, they don’t want it to be programmable. The most famous case was a Commodore 64 emulator in which it was possible to escape into the ROM BASIC. Apple pulled the app from the app store until the developer made it impossible to get into BASIC.
The iPad is more general-purpose than the iPhone, so they me be allowing more flexibility for it. I sure haven’t seen any indications of it, though, but Mission Control’s iPad hasn’t arrived yet so I haven’t seriously looked.