On the eve of Christmas Eve, the Cherokee hope to keep their language alive with the iPhone, more iPad 2 rumors abound, and Steve Jobs earns even more accolades. If it’s Thursday, December 23, these must be your remainders.
Cherokee Nation looks to iPhone app to help save its language (LA Times Blog)
iPhones support only about 50 of the thousands of languages spoken around the world (not including the language of love). One of those supported languages is Cherokee, which is reportedly spoken only by 8,000 of the tribe’s 290,000 members. The LA Times Blog reports that tribe elders hope that by getting Cherokee on iPhones, younger tribe members will finally start speaking their native (get it?) tongue. But that hope would seemingly equate cell phone speak like “lulz wut r u talkin’ bout” with English.
Apple’s next-gen iPad to get iPod touch-like back, wide-range speaker – rumor (AppleInsider)
The next edition of the iPad will sport a few new hardware features, according to rumors published on the Japanese Mac blog MacOtakara. Among the purported tweaks are a smaller bezel for the back of the device, and a wider-range speaker. As you know, “Smaller Bezel” has been topping analysts’ wishlists for the iPad since approximately never.
Steve Jobs is Financial Times Person of the Year (The Washington Post)
Thanks in large part to the iPad and the iPhone 4, the Financial Times has named Apple CEO Steve Jobs its person of the year. But since The Financial Times’s Website requires soul-sucking registration, we’re linking to the free (as in beer, speech, and no registration requirement-having) Washington Post instead. The Times points out that when Mr. Jobs first started scoring press accolades for his technical achievements, he was younger than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now. As Tom Lehrer might point out, when Mozart was Jobs’s age, he’d been dead for twenty years.
Obama cites Steve Jobs’ wealth, product success (CNet)
The Financial Times is all well and good, but it’s not the leader of the free world (yet). Luckily for Steve Jobs, President Barack Obama on Thursday also took time to compliment the man, celebrating him as someone truly living the American Dream. Said the President, “We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products. We expect that person to be rich, and that’s a good thing.” No argument here—or, likely, on Steve’s part—that the man is rich, but I wonder if “two or three different revolutionary products” is selling things a bit short. Besides the original Apple, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, there’s also the exclamation “Boom,” the turtleneck with sneakers outfit, and the marketing brilliance of the adjective “magical.”