Your Android phone is a supercomputer. It can calculate the exact number of pixels from here to the Moon, but even then, there are some seemingly obvious things it’s missing. For instance, on the standard, pre-installed Calculator app, you can only do standard scientific calculator tasks. This lets your phone replace a $20 calculator from Target, but is nothing special. With the free, confusingly named app Calculator, you can upgrade your Calculator app to include graphing, matrices, and more.

While the similar icon and app name may lead you to believe that Calculator will replace Calculator, Calculator in fact installs a second Calculator alongside Calculator. You’ll want to find which one is your phone’s original calculator and disable it so as not to get utterly confused every time you open up the app drawer.

Once opened, it looks exactly like the original Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean calculator app, except if you slide to the right twice, you’ll get a matrices screen. This lets you do all of the fun math with matrices you learned in junior high and have forgotten since then. Swiping to the left gives you the Hex screen and the graphing screen. To graph something, just enter a function using the newfound Y and X keys on the Advanced panel and hit the Equals key. It’ll appear on the chart once you swipe over.

To view your history, just tap on the horizontal barline at the top. Not everything is rosy in Upgraded Calculator land, unfortunately. There’s no option to change the zoom level of the graph, which does away with most of the usefulness of including a graph. Other than that, though, the app is wonderful, and is a definite step above the standard Android calculator.

Price: Free!

Version discovered: v1.5.3

Requires: Android 4.0+

Download size: 970KB

Calculator on Play Store