There is a $19 dollar a month, unlimited talk, text, and data cellphone plan. Seriously, this is for real. The plan is offered by Republic Wireless and seems to be everything it claims to be, with a few sensible caveats, but hey, it’s $19 dollars a month. It would be sketchy if there weren’t any caveats. The plan was only announced last week, to much jaw-dropping, and now it really exists. It seems that the magic is all made possible by Wi-Fi being used in an exceedingly intelligent way.

The debate about whether cellphones cause cancer has gone back and forth as conflicting studies are released on the topic. Indeed, things looked decidedly grim when the World Health Organization declared that the matter warranted further investigation. Now, a massive Danish study encompassing hundreds of thousands of subjects over 15 years has found no link between mobile phones and instances of cancer.

The study used the medical records of some 360,000 cellphone-using Danes over the course of 15 years — roughly the point when cellphones were introduced to Denmark. The researchers compared this group’s incidence of cancer against the medical records of millions in a control-group. The study found no observable link between cancer and cellphone use.

The study has been published on the website of the British Medical Journal.

A recent California Supreme Court ruling has made it illegal for police officers to search the contents of a cellphone without first getting a search warrant. This overrules a decision last January which had, according to state Senator Mark Leno, “legalized the warrant-less search of cellphones during an arrest, regardless of whether the information on the phone is relevant to the arrest or if criminal charges are ever filed.”

The new law, which the California State Assembly passed unanimously, completely turns the table on police officers’ access to your digital data. Whereas your car or your house can be searched on the spot if there is probable cause, it seems that this new law means that if you want to search a cellphone, you need a warrant 100 percent of the time. To boot, it’s not just cellphones, the law extends to all “portable electronic devices…capable of creating, receiving, accessing, or storing electronic data or communications.”

If you are anything like the average person, your cellphone might as well be attached to you. However, hard as it is to believe, there was a time when that was not the case because cellphones didn’t exist. Still, its uncanny how accurately their future was portrayed in media like Star Trek and, in a bizarre sort of way, Get Smart. Then, as they became available on the market, they grew up in media alongside reality. It started with a $4,000 brick-phone, and now when we’re basically back to Star Trek communicators, except they’re real.

This handy infographic from Product Development Technologies illustrates all that and fills in the spots in between, when phones weren’t hilariously huge or awesomely futuristic. If you have a phone, you owe it to yourself to know about it’s ancestors and keep their memory alive. Also, knowing what year Barbie got a cellphone might win you a few bucks in a trivia competition or something.

No sex, no shoes, no problem? Maybe if you are as attached to your cellphone as one new study would suggest. A new study, commissioned by communications company TeleNav, says that our society is obsessed with cellphones. The study sought an answer to the question: Exactly what would people give up before their cell phone? The answer is a surprising amount of life’s pleasures (and essentials).

The results show there are differences between the different types of smartphone and between genders, but overall, people were willing to go to great lengths to keep their phone in the palm of their hand. A third of all people surveyed were willing to give up sex for a week rather than go without their cellphone (although, 70 percent of these people were women). Another 70 percent said they would give up alcohol, 63 percent were willing to forego chocolate, and 55 percent of people were willing to go without caffeine rather than have no access to their cell phone. However, there were some limits to how far people would take their cellphone separation anxiety.

Harvard researcher Aviva Presser Aiden and her team have snagged a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and deploy Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) to Africa. These devices can be quickly and cheaply assembled, and can generate electricity from ordinary dirt to recharge cellphones.

Powering cellphones with dirt batteries may sounds like a trivial development, but it becomes quite pressing when you look at the numbers. 22% of Africans use cellphones, but over 500 million do not have access to electrical power. For these people, recharging a cellphone means walking perhaps for hours to a recharging station and paying for the power. Recharging a phone typically costs between $.50 and $1, which can add up to a significant amount when the average annual income is measured in “several hundred dollars.”

The dirt batteries work by taking advantage of the natural metabolic processes of certain microbes. (more…)

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is currently engaged in a war of words and requests for information on a device used by the Michigan state police that can extract information from cellphones. The device, which has reportedly been in use since at least 2008, is apparently being used by the police during minor traffic violations.

The device, called the Cellebrite UFED, has been tested by the Department of Justice which reported the device was capable of pulling all photos and video from an iPhone in under a minute and a half. Cellbrite says their devices also can extract, “existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags.” It can also extract your highly incriminating ringtones. These devices can also circumvent password protection, and are reported to work on over 3,000 cellphone models.

This isn’t Photoshopping. According to a friend of CrunchGear, there is a brand of popular phones in China made by a manufacturer named OPPO, and since the line of phones is popular, naturally, a knockoff was made. The thing is, the knockoff is replicating the OPPO logo in such a way that, well, yeah.

(CrunchGear via Engadget)

0888 888 888 is a cellphone number that will forever live in infamy in Bulgaria: It’s been permanently suspended by cell carrier Mobitel after all three of the people who’ve had it in the past ten years have died untimely deaths.

A Toronto woman whose husband left her after discovering that she had been having an affair is putting the blame squarely where it belongs: With her cellphone service provider, Rogers Wireless.

Rogers sent one “global” invoice to the home she shared with her husband, in which he discovered she had been making hours-long calls to one number; from there, he called the number, spoke to the “third party” with whom she had been having the affair, and walked out.

“I lost everything,” she says. “I want others to know what a big corporation has done. I trusted Rogers with my personal information. We had a contract — and agreement that put my life right in their hands.”

How much should the evil corporation, whose fault all of this is, cough up? $600,000, according to the woman behind the suit: