Pop Culture Blog | Funny News Reviews and Critique

With more and more iPhone apps being released every day, there’s great potential for innovative new ways to learn. But many users are unwilling to fork over $0.99-$4.99 for these educational tools and instead stick to the free or lite versions. Could this be creating a new breed of “cheap intellectual?”

The Tickle City Award Committee recently examined a variety of lite apps to determine whether they could provide any meaningful educational value. Results were mixed.

There were a few good apps for vocabulary building, but the free versions were limited to just the first few letters of the alphabet. If you were to actually use these apps to study, the effects on your vocabulary would be pretty amusing.

E-book readers are also incredibly popular and you can download them for free. While it costs money to download new books, they always throw in a teaser book, conveniently in the public domain. A cost-conscious iPhone user could download four or five readers and get the chance to read some of the classics they neglected to finish in high school English class.

We also downloaded lite apps for learning French, Japanese, Spanish and other foreign languages.  They were often very user friendly and full of great features; however, they usually cut you off after learning how to say “hello, how are you?” or teaching you the days of the week.

As a result of these lite versions, will a new breed of frugal iPhone “intellectuals” emerge?

Possessors of big vocabularies limited to words from “A” to “C?”

Extremely well versed in “Oliver Twist” after reading it over and over again on an e-book reader?

Confident speakers of the most basic of greetings in multiple languages?

We think these free iPhone intellectuals would be pretty buy stromectol ivermectin tickle city!