iPad

Tablets did not feature this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. After Apple released the first iPad in 2010, the market for Android tablets is not as hot as it once promised to be. Large screen smartphones are encroaching on the Tablets’ 7″ domain. Tech Crunch reports: To be fair, if you looked hard enough, you could find an Android tablet or two hidden in a corner of the Fira Gran Via. And Apple, the tablet leader, doesn’t come to MWC. But it’s safe to say that tablets are not the future for the Samsungs and LGs of the consumer electronics world.

In Charlottesville, I found myself having a lunch conversation one day with some folks who are involved in Christian education at the elementary and secondary level. They were talking about the challenges they face today. One of the biggest is the ubiquity of smartphones in the hands of kids. Parents think nothing of giving them to their children, the educators said, and many kids have virtually unlimited access to the Internet. There’s the “older brother porn problem” in which younger kids get turned on to porn by watching it on an older sibling’s smartphone.

From the Slope of Hope: Over the past ten months, in steps almost too small to be noticed by the mass media, Apple has shed over two hundred billion dollars in value. That's nearly one quarter of a trillion dollars in wealth which would have fed shareholder dreams of new houses, new boats, new jewelry, and mink coats, but..........it's gone.