850,000. Down the toilet.
Research by SimplySwitch, a company specializing in price comparison and switching carriers, found 4.5 million handsets are lost or damaged in the UK each year. Second to the death by watery grave, 810,000 handsets end up amongst the peanuts and broken hearts at a local pub, 315,000 stay behind for an extra long cab ride, 225,000 keep riding public transportation after their owners leave and 116,000 ended up in some dirty laundry.
So if you look a little more closely at the lederhosen that are adorning that mannequin, you'll see some buttons that might look familiar. Yep, those are cell phone controls, and ja, they're sewn right in to the clothing. The lederhosen come with a place to embed your cell phone and use the exterior, leg-based controls to operate it. You won't get an LCD, of course, but then you wouldn't be able to read it anyway unless you contorted yourself painfully around. You will get a mouthpiece, though, that is included in the suspenders straps.
For those who have squinted to read text on their cell phones, Stanford University researchers think they have hit upon a better way: Do it one word at a time.
The technique, known as Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, or RSVP, makes up for the tiny screens on mobile phones by presenting just one word at a time in the center of the screen for a fraction of a second before moving on to the next word. As a result, each word is far easier to read than is the case with standard presentations, in which a sentence or two of much smaller type scroll across the screen at a time.
In a demo version of the software, dubbed BuddyBuzz, the user gets to decide how fast the text scrolls. At its fastest, the words fly far faster than a reader can sound them out. But those who learn to read words without pronouncing them in their heads can actually read as many as 1,000 words a minute, making it potentially far faster than traditional methods of scrolling.
The LG Breathalyzer PhoneMore.
The phone has a built-in breathalyzer and is selling very well in Korea. Indeed, given that between 15 and 30% of all road deaths (depending on your country) involve drivers over the legal blood alcohol limits(..) "this phone will not be launching in the US this year, and at this time there are no plans to bring it over to the US at all. The original article announcing this phone was incorrect."
