Cell phone updates

Via Make Magazine, a new favorite blog, I see that now for $399 you can turn your cellphone into a rotary phone. The only problem I see is, it still could easily be lost. Why not just put a cord on it and plug it into the wall - then you'd always know where it is?

In the same vein ... in the old days, don't I recall, people used to wash mud off their cars? Now, according to Living on Earth interview, you can buy spray-on mud for your SUV, if you're embarrassed that you only drive it to the mall. Pure Shropshire mud.

It's flying off the shelves. ... I'm just shipping a load to Japan, we're opening up distributorships in Canada and in the U.S. I'm talking to people in Germany and Holland. The interest is phenomenal. We've had a hundred thousand hits on our web site.

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Make also points out this article from Slate Magazine on How To Kill a Dead Zone - My quest for perfect cell-phone reception by Sam Schechner:

My cell phone and my apartment never got along. I missed calls. When calls did come through, it sounded like I was talking to a drowning robot. I wasn't about to pay one of those gigantic contract termination fees, so I did the only logical thing—I got a new apartment.

I found out recently that there's another solution, a reception-boosting device called a cellular repeater. The name explains the simple concept: A large outdoor antenna tunes into the strongest cellular signal available and repeats it on a smaller antenna wired inside. Voila, you've got five bars.

... And what about the health consequences of putting a signal repeater in your bedroom? Several recent studies have shown no link between brain tumors and cell-phone use. But if you're really paranoid, you might be inclined to believe another recent study that found longtime cell-phone users in rural areas were more than three times more likely to get brain tumors than urban cell-phone toters. The researchers hypothesized that this higher cancer rate results from the extra juice that rural cell phones must transmit to reach distant cell towers.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Cellphone, Progress