Gitex Shopper, the spring version, has ended but I am not sad as there will be another one in September, when I can again salivate over cell phones.

Every morning for the past weeks, I was inundated with the greatest offers ever, on electronic gizmos, and I would peruse the colourful brochures with great interest at the breakfast table, and just before going to bed.

Momentous events were happening all around us, but my children were not interested in such mundane matters and would separate the main section of the paper from the colourful brochures every morning and study the offers carefully.

I found that even my maid had carefully stashed away one brochure near her handbag and when I asked her what was she thinking of buying, she looked at me puzzled. I pointed to the glossy booklet and she laughed and said it was great for polishing the glass windows!

I looked up a site called Newton: Ask a Scientist, because I knew a newspaper has many uses, but this was the first time I learned that it was great for cleaning glass. A guy called Matt answered the question: Newspapers are good at cleaning glass because the paper leaves very little lint. Compared to paper towels, newsprint is much more rigid and hence the fibres will not individually separate like they will from a paper towel.

He went on explain that the newspaper ink does not come off for two reasons: One, you are wiping a mirror or glass, which is a highly polished surface, so there is nothing for the dried ink to stick to.

Quad core or dual core

He said that when you wet newsprint with liquid, the ink becomes infused in the fibres of the newsprint. Glass does not absorb ink, while paper will. And so all of the dirt on the window or mirror will be absorbed into the newsprint. I wondered where my maid got the time to look up all that stuff on the internet!

I asked my son whether I should buy the mobile phone with the dual sim card and a quad-core processor and he asked me what would I be using my phone for. I said to socialise on social media, where people communicate with each other with words such as, “whatever”, “noway” and “cya”.

He suggested that I buy a cheaper one with a dual-core processor as not many apps are today written for quad core, or something like that. He also told me not to be bullied into taking all the assorted stuff from the back of the warehouse that was being pushed along with a mobile phone, like a headphone, a battery booster and a baby’s toilet seat.

Then I realised what he was taking about. One advert said this in bold letters, or should have: “Buy a phone and you will save Dh469 for taking away all this stuff we could not sell, anyway.”

My wife never reads these brochures as she is not a tech nerd, but she studiously reads everything that a major hypermarket advertises. She looks longingly at pictures of laundry detergents and steam mops just before we go off for our weekly grocery shopping.

Good thing, she does not get interviewed by a roving reporter in a mall who usually asks women what they think about the rising prices, as she has no clue how much a bag of onions costs.

I never did go to the consumer electronics fair because I remembered the last time I did, it was jam-packed with people carrying tonnes of brochures and huge cardboard boxes and people were tripping over trolley-full of tablets and the noise in the hall was well, noisy.

Anyway, I might go to the next fair as Samsung would have come out with S6. Maybe?