Apple iBooks

Typical. A day after posting about Kindle, I discover its Apple rival: iBooks, not to be mistaken for its discontinued iBook laptop range. It released about a month ago and it appears decent. There seems to be a larger collection of free books than Kindle (thanks to the Gutenberg Project), but I'd have to verify that properly. So far I've downloaded a whole bunch of free classics including: Tolstoy's War & Peace, Kipling's Jungle Book and Bronté's Wuthering Heights. And it comes with a free copy of Winnie-the-Pooh! Will I ever buy a real book again?

Ramadan Kareem

It started yesterday in Oman. And a Muslim classmate from high school came home to visit. It was still mid-afternoon. Barely seconds after wishing him a generous month of fasting, I went back into auto-pilot and asked him what he would like to drink. Naturally he refused but he was kind enough to stop me before it became too embarrassing. Not that he minded much. But still. Schoolboy error. And I shouldn't make excuses, but I'm pretty sure this is my first Ramadan in Oman since we were in high school. Though truth be told, he really should've taught me a lesson and played along.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

iPhone worship has seen the media lose all sense of proportion

John Naughton has written a timely article for The Guardian. He asks:

"Are we perhaps losing our sense of proportion? The smartphone market is interesting, but just a small segment of the overall market. In 2009, for example, something like 175m smartphones were sold. The top end of industry predictions of sales over the next few years is about 500m devices. But the world currently buys about 1.3bn phones a year, the vast majority of which are "dumbphones" – ie simple handsets that can't access the internet and which are much cheaper to own and run."

He uses Moore's Law to explain why smartphones will not go down market. Instead dumbphones will gradually become more sophisticated.

Do you agree?