Cell Phone Models

Most people in states such as California, New York and New Jersey are aware by now that holding a cell phone to your ear while driving can get them into legal trouble. Drivers in states with limited cell-phone driving restrictions — such as prohibiting teen drivers from using cell phones — may be somewhat aware of the restrictions and accompanying penalties. (If you’re unsure about your state’s laws, view this list of current state-by-state regulations.)

But, if you don’t live in one of the states or cities that have enacted hands-free cell phone driving laws, you probably haven’t given it much thought.

You still drive around care-free chatting away on your cell phone, daring the gods of traffic to send a tree branch in the middle of the road your way. But, if you plan any kind of road travel this summer, you better perk up your ears, put that cell phone down and listen up. (more…)

It’s your dirty little secret, the thing you don’t talk about at cocktail parties: you still have a landline. Meanwhile, your friends brag about the money they’ve saved by cutting the cord. True, most Americans are still tethered to a home phone line; however, as the complications of moving towards a wireless-only existence grow few, it’s become increasingly popular to cancel landline accounts.

Why do you need two phone numbers, anyway?

If you’ve been asking yourself that question, you got good news last week, when a bi-partisan group on Capitol Hill took action to simplify “porting” an existing landline phone number to a new cell phone account. Soon, it should be easy to reassign your home number to a cell phone.

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Today I’d like to share with you some rather surprising mobile industry data conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between August 3 to September 5, 2007, among a sample of 2,400 adults, 18 and older. I’m not sure what you’ll be able to do with it, but nonetheless this is some juicy data for sure.
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We’re not missing anything, are we? When you go to a cell phone store, what are your expectations? Certainly not the best price, and certainly not unbiased advice. If you could find that at the local store, there’d be no need for online stores like Wirefly.com.

So we found it amusing that this notion – that carriers and salespeople have other motivations — appears to be scandalous over in Great Britain.

As the British television investigator reports, these are “some of the mobile phone industry’s most closely guarded secrets,” secrets that “the mobile phone industry doesn’t want you to know.” We learn how “their stores sell us deals that many of us don’t want or need, and in the process make sure that they and their employers earn secret commission.”

I should invite this guy to spend a weekend at a mall in the U.S. He’d get enough material to last the rest of the year.

Your state just passed a cell phone driving law. You know this because it’s on your local news. But what if you go on a road trip?

Do you know the cell phone driving laws of every state you pass through? Will you be pulled over for calling your kids to make sure they’re okay? The Governors’ Highway Safety Association has compiled information on cell phone driving laws for every state. Here are a few key points:

* 5 states (California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Washington), the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands have enacted jurisdiction-wide cell phone laws prohibiting driving while talking on handheld cell phones.

* 17 states and the District of Columbia have special cell phone driving laws for novice drivers.

* No state completely bans all types of cell phone use (handheld and hands-free) while driving.

Since all states allow hands-free cell phone use, play it safe and use speaker phone or a Bluetooth Headset.

Today the tabloids are abuzz with the news that Carrie Underwood broke off her relationship with actor Chace Crawford via text message.

Not so unusual, says a new Wirefly survey.

Today Wirefly released the results of a survey on consumer text messaging, in which 1 in every 25 cell phone users say they have broken off a romance via text message.

And that wasn’t the only surprising result of our survey. This project was designed to take a closer look at consumers’ text messaging habits; we asked people a series of related questions over a month-long span, and actually managed to shatter some common misconceptions. For starters, we assumed people used text messaging for brief, choppy communication full of abbreviations and emoticons. Not so, says the survey data.

We actually found that 35% of respondents typically send lengthy texts of “several sentences.” That beat out the other options, “one word” (4%), “several words” (33%), and “one sentence” (28%), and seems to indicate that text messagers may be more literate than previously thought…

For more on these results, plus additional data that digs further into the motivations for text messaging, click through for the full Wirefly press release.

Shop free cell phones at Wirefly.com

The CTIA Wireless 2008 exhibition is underway in Las Vegas, and Wirefly has people on the ground in Sin City, meeting with cell phone manufacturers, and sending back some great pictures of new devices.

We’ll feature more specific device-oriented posts soon; for now, though, it seemed appropriate to open our convention coverage by taking a wider view of the industry as a whole. The folks at CTIA have released their year-end survey data from 2007, and there’s plenty to digest:

**The overall number of wireless customers in the U.S. jumped by 9.6% in 2007, and now stands at 255.5 million.

**Average monthly bills, meanwhile, actually fell by almost a dollar, moving from $50.56 to $49.79.

**And here’s a pretty incredible number - the raw number of SMS text messages sent during December of 2007 was 48.1 billion. That’s up a ridiculous 157% over the same month a year prior, in 2006. Just look at this progression: 18.7 billion in Dec. 2006, 28.8 billion in June 2007, 48.1 billion in Dec. 2007. Now that’s a trend.

For more info directly from CTIA, visit the organization’s website. In the meantime, we’ll keep our bloggers chasing after the best pictures from the convention. Stay tuned!