Author: Craig Timmins

Smuggled cell phones inside prisons are becoming an epidemic in the United States, particularly in California where eleven thousand cell phones were seized from prisoners last year. Cell phones have been used to arrange attacks and extortions, and while cell phone jammers have been touted as a solution, they have the less than useful side effect of also jamming official emergency communications.

Cell phones are becoming essential items for catching criminals due to their own carelessness. Last week a man accused of killing his wife had the charge against him upgraded to first degree murder after it was found that in the process of committing the crime, he had accidentally sent a voicemail message to his wife’s cell phone which recorded the entire incident. Now a burglar has been arrested by police after accidentally dropping his old cell phone at the scene of the crime.

Nokia has stunned the cell phone industry by teaming up with Microsoft, agreeing to switch its current smart-phone software in favor of Windows Phone 7. The move was greeted with shock and dismay by many, resulting in Nokia’s stock falling by fourteen percent on Friday, but Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, who took over the company in September in what was seen as a way of “shaking things up” for the firm, has made no apologies for the decision, noting that Nokia is set to earn billions of dollars from Microsoft in return for using their cell phone software system. “This is something I don’t think was completely explained,” Elop says in response to some of the criticisms of the decision.

Cell phones are helping to breach the gap in terms of access to the internet between whites and ethnic groups such as African Americans and Latinos in the United States, according to a new study. The report from the Pew Hispanic Centre, suggests that Hispanics and African Americans are much more likely to access the internet from cell phones rather than from home computers, indicating that cell phones are helping to beat the “digital divide” in internet access, as it has been termed. The difference remains telling, however, with only two thirds of adult Hispanics and African Americans using the internet in 2010, as opposed to seventy five percent of Caucasians, but the gap is narrowing thanks cell phones.

A mix up of cell phones led to a brutal assault… just hours after the same people were involved in another brutal assault. Four men attacked a man and a woman in an Eastside neighborhood in Wenatchee about half past one in the morning on Saturday, when the man and woman were spotted walking in the middle of the street by a group of men in a car. When the inhabitants of the car indicated for the couple to move, the man responded with an obscene gesture, resulting in a violent altercation.

A cell phone has played a key role in catching a man who murdered his wife. Ronald Earl Williams stabbed his wife to death four years ago in 2007, but did not expect the crime to be recorded. It appears that during the attack on his wife, Mariama Williams, Ronald Earl somehow accidentally activated his own cell phone, which sent a voicemail to Mariama’s own cell phone… and literally recorded her own murder.

A new cell phone company in the United Kingdom is set to unveil a brand new cell phone with tight Facebook integration built in. United Kingdom start up company INQ Mobile will be releasing the phone, which apparently goes under the name of the INQ Cloud Touch and which uses the Android operating system, with no less than four buttons relating to Facebook users on the phone’s home screen. The four buttons will include at least one to integrate your Facebook friends with your contacts, as well as a real time Facebook activity news feed, which will be a particularly prominent feature.

I recall the very first time I heard about a cell phone recycling program. I was headed into a Verizon shop and right at the side of the door was a big barrel for used cell phones. The purpose was to collect unwanted phones which would then be refurbished and given to women who were taking part in a ‘back to work’ program designed to help them get off of welfare and back in charge of their own lives.