A growing number of people are becoming addicted to their mobile phones, Blackberries and other digital devices, researchers are warning. Our phones are address books, file storage devices, cameras, video recorders, wayfinders, and hand-held portals to the Internet—and they don’t stop there. With over 225 million mobile phones manufactured each year worldwide, innovation in these devices is occurring at an unprecedented pace. In the not-too-distant future, phones will include projection systems, removing the barrier of the small screen; such devices are now in prototype. Taken together, mobile computing, portable devices, and ubiquitous broadband mean that we have access to people, information, and data wherever we may be. The increasing capability of phones, plus the fact that virtually everyone has one, is already making these devices an attractive delivery platform.
Mobile phones are becoming the storehouses of our digital lives, containing a growing share of our personal and professional resources and data. The worst problem seems to be that conversations on mobile phones are more noticeable than face-to-face conversations. As many as 10,000 mobile phones are stolen every month. Every hour 1712 mobile phones are upgraded in the UK alone. In fact, mobile phones are being introduced by the manufacturers in a wide range of categories like music phones, camera phones, multimedia phones, PDA phones and smart phones.
