Price: $0.99 Score: 9/10 Category: Utilities
Sometimes, as iPad users, we have calculations to make. Not the mere multiplication and division calculations we can do in our head or on our iPhone’s stock app, but calculations that are much more robust and complicated. This is where Calcbot swoops in to make up for the fact that the iPad doesn’t come with a calculator app. Created by Tapbots, this app offers plenty of functionality with a clean user interface.
Calcbot’s seamless, big buttoned interface works in both landscape and portrait mode. The calculator fills the entire iPad screen in portrait mode, and in landscape the calculator is set next to a tape on the right that keeps track of every calculation and the steps you took along the way.
If you make a mistake, you can delete the calculation by sliding over the equation in the same way that you would an email in your iPad inbox. Swiping over the calculator’s functions also allows the display of more, increasingly advanced functions like square root, factorial, log, natural logarithm, exponential, and trigonometric functions.
The app doesn’t support parenthesis yet (to come in the next update), but tapping the up arrow prior to pressing the function you want calculates the inverse, meaning just about everything you need comes with CalcBot.
Every time you press the equals sign your record of calculations shows up in the tape, and when you are done you can email the entire roll by clicking over the top of the right panel and typing in the recipient’s email address.
While Calcbot is clean and well executed, I would love to some sort of capability for visual graphing, as well as the ability to add notes or units to the tape. That way the numbers gain meaning for outsiders or those times when you stumble on a set of old calculations and wonder what it was all for. There is the capacity for rounding for dollars within the app and you can add units to the calculations within the tape’s inline text when you’re sharing via email, but the addition of units could bring this app to an entirely new level.
As an overall product though, Calcbot is excellent. It’s simple, streamlined, capable of a lot, and less than a dollar.
Bottom Line: Calcbot is a well designed calculator app that’s accessible and easy to use for both simple and more complex calculations. 9/10
