Multi-touching

I wound up on this product’s page in the iPhone App Store on a whim—wanting to see what exactly a $149.99 application was doing in a 99-cent ecosystem. I delved into the customer reviews (one of the rising literary forms of our era) and realized that: a) nearly every reviewer was giving the product five stars; b) nobody was mentioning the price except to say how cheap it was, and c) this may have been the first and only time the App Store has made me want to smile and to cry at the same time. customer review for Proloquo2Go (itunes store link), 4 August 2009 :: see also “Insurers Fight Speech-Impairment Remedy,” by Ashlee Vance, The New York Times, 14 September 2009

★★★★★ My daughter is 23 and has been using augmentative communication devices since she was a little girl. We have used devices from several different companies, so we are pretty experienced. This is, by far, the easiest to program. There are lots of preprogrammed categories, so it is possible to start communicating right away, without doing anything other than downloading it. … After years of dragging around a 4–7 pound communication device that looks sort of ‘clinical’, it’s really cool to have a small iPod touch and a speaker (all of 15 ounces!) to bring with us. … My daughter has enough things to separate her from her peers. It’s nice to have something for a change that’s the same as other people are using. Can’t say enough good about it!!!