Sony Tablet S Used by the Pope to Light Up Holiday Lights

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Christmas is not complete without tree-lighting, as the Vatican apparently affirms. Pope Benedict XVI recently activated a Christmas light display using a Sony Android tablet, no less.

The Roman Catholic Church is constantly trying to keep up with the times, evident with how liturgies and traditions are being updated to cater to modern needs. The Pope is known to use social media to help spread the word, and has, in fact, made his first tweet using an iPad. But the pontiff seems to be platform-agnostic with his recent activation of a holiday light display using an Android app running on a Sony Tablet S.

The display is not actually a Christmas tree, but rather a 2,123-foot tall lighting display in Gubbio, Italy, which is about 130 miles away from the Pope’s residence in Vatican City. To activate the lights, the Vatican said the Pope would “touch the screen of a Sony tablet with an Android operating system which, via the Internet, will transmit the command to switch on the electric current to the tree.”

This is quite a complicated way of saying the Pope flipped a virtual light switch. But the question here is why the Vatican chose to use an Android tablet rather than the iPad, which Benedict XVI is already known to use. The answer may lie in the app-submission process that Apple is quite infamous for. Observers say that the Vatican’s app developers might have to wait for weeks or months after submitting a simple app that will turn on several light bulbs, before Apple would give its certification and have the app run on the iPad. But with Android, it’s easy enough to develop, install and run un-certified apps.

Perhaps the Vatican will use Siri or Kinect gestures to turn on Christmas displays next year.