iPods in Iraq

There’s a curi­ous lit­tle piece over at TUAW.com. Appar­ent­ly Amer­i­can sol­diers in Iraq and Afghanistan are being sup­plied (on a lim­it­ed basis) with iPods equipped with spe­cial soft­ware that will help them com­mu­ni­cate in Iraqi Ara­bic, Kur­dish, Dari and Push­to. The soft­ware will hand­i­ly “dis­play a pho­net­ic trans­la­tion, speak a phrase through an attached speak­er, dis­play the phrase in local writ­ing, or demon­strate hand ges­tures that are com­mon in Ara­bic.” Sure­ly this is a can­di­date for our once pop­u­lar piece: 10 Unex­pect­ed Uses of the iPhone.

If you want to learn a good 40 lan­guages with your iPod, see our For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

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