mobile phones

Ever lose your cellphone charger? When your doomed search for friends or family with a phone of similar brand/vintage eventually fails, it's off to the third-party charger vendor where confusion and high prices await.

We can all agree, then, that proprietary charger plugs are among the larger pains in the respective behinds of cellphone users everywhere. But not so anymore in Europe: the EU is leading the way to create a standard micro-USB charger for all cellphones sold.

Nokia recently hosted a cocktail party to introduce journalists to its chief designer, Alastair Curtis. The Brit's formal slide presentation was a carefully crafted marketing piece, hammering in his Finnish employer's slogans such as "beautiful to use" and "connecting people." And he provided a bright glimpse into the company's future plans in response to our questions.

The revelations started when Curtis described Nokia's record in America. "The U.S. hasn't been Nokia's strongest suit," he conceded. But the company aims to change that, having just completed a fact-finding trip around the States, where Americans were "talking about music, talking about gestures, talking about what they want for the future."

Talking about gestures?

Nokia indicated today that it intends to release a bunch of new phones through U.S. carriers in the next few months. The Finnish manufacturer sells 40 percent of the mobiles worldwide, but only accounts for about 10 percent of the U.S. market. But a daily paper in Finland quoted a Nokia chief designed as saying that the company plans to ramp up its U.S. presence.

The days of lugging around and pulling out hefty guide books could be nearing an end: The eyePhone, a program currently being developed in Europe, uses a combination of satellite information, object-recognition software and Internet data to provide information on landmarks in a scene captured through a mobile phone's lens.

European travelers may soon have a chance to chat away on their own phones while in flight. For the new system to work, planes would be outfitted with small mobile base stations known as pico cells. The cells would be switched off during take-off, and turned on once the planes reach a given altitude, which would be a minimum of 3,000 meters. Phone signals would be routed to the mobile base stations, which would in turn dispatch signals to ground-based networks through a satellite link.

Few places are more materialistic than Las Vegas, with its grandiose hotels and stacks of cash. But at last week's CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association) convention-which showcased several acres of upcoming cellphone and wireless technology-the focus was less on material goods than on what you can do with them. The exhibits boasted no gotta-get-it-now phone, but they did promise many ways to do more with the phone you already have. From file-sharing to postcard-making, the latest possibilities go far beyond mere talk.