iPad a big hit with giant sumo wrestlers
The Japanese Sumo Association hands out iPads to wrestlers as the device's bigger size makes it easier on the wrestlers' rather large fingers.
The world wasn't designed for sumo wrestlers. It is the equivalent of one of us normal humans living inside a doll's house.
So please imagine the joy in the wrestlers' eyes and the twitch in their fingers when they discovered the existence of the iPad. Here is this beautiful, magical, simple machine that is actually big enough for their digits.
The excitement of all those associated with this sport of giants was so uncontrollable that, according to Reuters, the Japanese Sumo Association has handed out iPads to the 51 sumo "stables" or clubs, so that they might begin to communicate with something more than a bow and a nappy grab.
Many sumo wrestlers live in these stables as part of the sport's ritual. And it is not an easy life. The life expectancy of a sumo wrestler is, on average, 10 years less than that of a non-wrestling Japanese man. Sumo wrestlers are not absurdly tall, their average height being only 5'11." But they do have some considerable width to them.
The sport's image took something of a pummeling recently when one of the finer sumo performers, Keiji Tamiya, was banned for life for betting on baseball and handing out $35,000 to a blackmailer from the mob.
While the new ubiquity of the iPad might make it easier for wrestlers to communicate with each other, surely it might also make it easier for them to communicate with bookies and those with nefarious motives. Still, the iPad doesn't yet solve one small communication problem--calling.
It is tempting to imagine the iPad as an iPhone for the larger-sized. So perhaps Apple might make a special sumo edition that allows you to hold it to your ear and make phone calls.