Engadget has an article(from a UK tabloid – The Sun) about:

a guy in Wales who is so addicted to text messaging that he’s started doing it in his sleep, even sending a text message to one of his friends while he was having a nightmare that read “Help, I’m in trouble, someone’s chasing me.”

OK, put the cell phone down and slowly back away…

Wired had an interesting
article on cell phone
use.

Talking on a cell phone
makes you drive like a retiree _ even if you’re only a teen, a new study shows.
A report from the University of Utah says when motorists between 18 and 25 talk
on cell phones, they drive like elderly people _ moving and reacting more slowly
and increasing their risk of
accidents.

“If you put a
20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, his reaction times are
the same as a 70-year-old driver,” said David Strayer, a University of Utah
psychology professor and principal author of the study. “It’s like instant
aging.”

And it doesn’t matter whether the
phone is hand-held or handsfree, he said. Any activity requiring a driver to
“actively be part of a conversation” likely will impair driving abilities,
Strayer said.

In fact,
motorists who talk on cell phones are more impaired than drunken drivers with
blood-alcohol levels exceeding 0.08, Strayer and colleague Frank Drews, an
assistant professor of psychology, found during research conducted in
2003.

So if you are driving behind me
and wonder why I have started slouching down in my seat, wearing hats and why my
left blinker has been on for 5 blocks… I am on my cell
phone.

I just changed my cell phone to a Motorola v551 from my old Nokia 3650. I love the size and the look. I have heard great things about the camera, but so far I have not been blown away by its performance. I have a couple of disappointments. I shopped for only bluetooth phones because I loved being able to sync from my Mac Address Book to my Nokia. So the 551 has bluetooth and can sync, but cannot sync using bluetooth. Also bluetooth is by default off and you have to turn it on to grab images, etc. Also the address book is more primitive than what was in the Nokia.

CNet reports that an Australia man has been arrested for taking pictures of topless female sunbathers with his cell phone’s camera.

A local court in Australia fined the offender 500 Australian dollars, making him the first person in the country convicted of engaging in offensive behavior with a phone on the beach, according to a report in the newspaper Australian. The man, who pleaded guilty last month, said he had planned to show his friends the various breasts he was spotting on the beach as a joke–until a boyfriend of one of the sunbathers confronted him and called the police.

SlashDot reports that Kyocera recalled about 40,000 cellphones for free replacement , because of batteries overheating and venting superheated gases. Yahoo says that safety officials have received 83 reports of cell phones exploding or catching fire in the last two years. Now that is going to leave a mark.

The Consumer Electronics Association has come out with this list of creative ways to use a Camera Phone:

?CLICK CREATIVELY?NOVEL USES FOR YOUR CAMERA PHONE

1. Tired of searching for your car in parking garages? Use your camera phone tosnap a picture to help you remember where you parked.

…click permlink for more

The Consumer Electronics Association has a new campaign for responsible cell phone use:

?Think Before You Click!?

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) thanks you for purchasing a new wireless camera phone. While your new camera phone provides you with the flexibility to make a phone call and instantly take a photo and record video, CEA urges you to use this device responsibly. To facilitate the responsible use of this device, CEA has created the Camera Phone Code of Conduct and requests that every consumer adhere to this set of voluntary guidelines when using the camera or video function of the phone.

1. Camera phones should not be used where photographic equipment is typically banned, for example: museums, movie theaters, and live performances. Users should look for signs posted in public places. which indicate whether photographic equipment is banned.

…click permlink for more

More and more news events are being captured first by people with cell phone cameras according to this story at the BBC.

Already on-the-spot snappers are helping newspapers add immediacy to their breaking news stories headlines, where professional photographers only arrive in time for the aftermath. Celebrities might not welcome such a change because they may never be free of a new breed of mobile phone paparazzi making their lives a bit more difficult. Already one tabloid newspaper in LA is issuing photographers with camera phones to help them catch celebrities at play.

Only last week, the world media highlighted the killing of the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, notorious after making a controversial film about Islamic culture.One day later De Telegraaf, a daily Amsterdam newspaper, became news on its own when it published a picture taken with a mobile phone of Mr van Gogh’s body moments after he was killed.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a talk by New York Times writer David Pogue. He was talking about good vs bad user interface design. Apparently he wrote a column once that complained that to put his Nokia phone into silent mode you had to go down into about the 4th level menu. He received a letter from a Nokia engineer who pointed out that to switch your phone to one of you profiles you just have to tap the power button. It is an undocumented feature. Sure enough, I have had Nokia phones for years and did not know that either. Here is further information from the Nokia Tips site:

As you already know, you can change profiles by selecting them using the Profiles menu option. You may also know that you press the power button and then select the profile you want from the resulting menu. However, you may not have known that you can select a profile even quicker than that. Just press the power button once, then hit key 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 (or 7 for the 3390). This will select the various profiles immediately. Power-2 is “Normal” and so on up the list. Power-1 turns the phone off instantly (no waiting).

Yesterday I saw a link to a new cell phone from Motorola that it says “will switch calls seamlessly between cellular services and wireless Internet networks, potentially offering business customers big savings if the technology works as promised”. The idea is that when you are close to your wi-fi network then it is a voice over IP phone, otherwise it is a cell phone. Cool.