Yumarsono Muhyi

It's easy to have any Arabic-English dictionary for computer, we can find many of them in Google. But it won't be easy to have an Arabic-English we can read in our mobile phone. The cirtumstance is getting even worse, if our mobile phone doesn't support Arabic fonts.

I finally found a great resource: Arabic-English dictionary for mobile phones, even if our phone doesn't support Arabic fonts. It's an online resource, so we have must have Internet connection (or "data plan") in our mobile phone to read the dictionary.

The dictionary is titled "Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon (Dictionary)", and it's really free right now. You can download the PDF (with hundreds of MB for each chapter) from http://www.studyquran.co.uk/LLhome.htm. The online version is http://www.studyquran.co.uk/PRLonline.htm, on which we can read it from our non-Arabic-supported mobile phone.

http://www.studyquran.co.uk/PRLonline.htm is good, since we don't have to type any Arabic fonts/characters to search. All we have to do is click the character image shown, and the http://www.studyquran.co.uk/PRLonline.htm will lead us to the letter dictionary. After that, we can search our intended words.

May be it's important to say that before we read http://www.studyquran.co.uk/PRLonline.htm, we must understand the basic Arabic word "root". Since every Semitic (Middle-East) languages -such as: Arabic (Arab Peninsula, North Africa, and Malta), Aramaic (Jordan, Syria, Lebanon), and Hebrew (Israel)- have this kind of property. Every word has basic three letters that form the word, which is called as "root".

For those who actively read and speak in Arabic and English, http://www.studyquran.co.uk/PRLonline.htm is a perfect dictionary for them. But this site perhaps doesn't suite perfectly for Malta. As I mentioned, Malta language is Arabic (not Italian nor Latin), but they write with Latin letters, not Arabic characters.

Makataba Shamela is the greatest electronic resource for classic Islamic books in Arabic language. These books is Islam reference for many subjects in this religion, and can be downloaded in computer and read from it.

But it would be very good if we can have them in our mobile phone, in a small-size and portable and readable format. We still can read some of the Makataba Shamela ebook collection, in epub format. We can download it from http://shamela.ws/index.php/search/last-epub.

ePub has became a favorite ebook standard in many mobile devices: Android (of course), Symbian, Windows Mobile, and also BlackBerry. But only Android that has many ePub readers, and many of them are free. It was hard to find any ePub reader in mobile OS other than Android-powered devices.

But it's easy now to read ePub books in Symbian, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry. The ePub reader is OverDrive. After installing OverDrive, all we have to do is copy the *.epub books to our mobile device (either in external memory or internal memory), and open the epub book.

OverDrive is so benefecial to me, since by using this app, I can read many Arabic books in my (old version) BlackBerry. I downloaded many Islamic books from Shamela (http://shamela.ws/index.php/search/last-epub). It was tedious to me when I was trying to find any epub reader for my (old version) BlackBerry. But, thank God, I finally found this very good ePub reader. Many thanks from me to OverDrive developers

The competition between mobile OSes is almost reaching to the top. One OS will win, maybe Android for this year and the next year. But, "as long as the tire is rolling, the upside will go down, and the downside will go up" (Indonesian proverb), or the winner still can lose and the loser still can win. The years after, it could be Symbian again, or Blackberry again, or even a new OS we've never heard before.

With this crowded and frenzy competition, I see one thing in common: we obviously lack of mobile developers, for any kind of mobile OS. It's not hard (for programmer) to learn one of these OS, or even to learn all of them. But why is it so hard to find a mobile developer?

And if we focus on Indonesia as the biggest market for mobile phone user in South East Asia and Pasific, it's kinda sad thing to know that there are not enough mobile developers arise from this country.

Therefore, I'm thinking and inviting my students, and all undergraduates (in Indonesia and the surrounding countries), to join and create a community of mobile developer. If you're interested, just mail me, send me a comment from this blog, or invite me to your BB, my PIN is 30D9E567. We shall discuss about this very soon.

It seems that Blackberry is still the most favorite mobile phone to buy in Indonesia. Indonesian people, especially in Jakarta, are willing to stay waiting in queue line to buy a new brand of Blackberry (with discounted price, of course). They are also willing waiting in the queue all night long, and even hold their need to go to the toilet (also all night long).

I've said to my students in some campuses in Jakarta in previous semester of my classes, that very soon, Blackberry will give up with Android's attack. We don't have to wait for 2012 to come to see Blackberry's domination to fall. And it seems to be true.

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