The best thing, and maybe the worst thing, about cellphones is that you can bring them anywhere. Gone are the days of being attached to the wall, the days of phones that can only be used to talk to people, and the days of not having Internet access in the bathroom. Well, that last one may have its downsides. According to a recent study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Queen Mary, University of London, 92% of the phones studied had bacteria all over them and 16% had E. Coli, everyone’s favorite bacteria of fecal origin.

The study didn’t just involve going around testing phones for bacteria, although that was part of it. In addition to testing the phones, the researchers gave the phones owners’ an opportunity to self-report their hygiene habits. Spoiler alert: Some of them were big, fat liars.

GPS capable phones have been around for a while and are an absolute godsend if you have a sense of direction that is as bad as mine. The downside is that I have to rely on other people’s GPS enabled phones because I’m still living in the Stone Age. If the FCC has its way –which it will, it just ruled on this– all phones will have GPS come 2018.

Why? The reason they cite is for the purpose of tracking 911 calls. Whether or not that’s just a smokescreen depends on your personal level of paranoia and frequency of illegal activites. Currently, if a non-GPS enabled phone dials 911, the provider has to triangulate the location, which is annoying and inefficient, apparently. Straight up GPS is just much better for figuring out exactly where you are, however that makes you feel.

A smaller version of the Telenoid R1, the Elfoid is a mobile phone in the shape of a human. Developed by Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, the Elfoid supposedly has an outer coating that feels like human skin, and it tickles you when you get a call. If that weren’t creepy enough, a blue and red light are embedded within the chest cavity of the phone, changing to blue when the phone is in use, and red when the phone is in standby. The design of the Elfoid is supposed to be ambiguous, leaving users unable to discern between a young, old, male or female humanoid, and the creepy thing moves around and gestures as someone talks to you through the phone.

(News.com.au via Engadget)

Now that’s a feature made with users in mind: A Redditor spotted the above set of instructions in the manual for a colleague’s new Samsung phone, detailing how to make fake incoming calls to “get out of meetings or unwanted conversations.”

To make a fake call

*In Idle mode, press and hold the Navigation key down.

*When the keys are locked, press the Navigation key down four times.

Apparently this is a standard feature for many Samsung phones.

(Reddit via Boing Boing)

With the help of a four million pound grant (about six-and-a-half million dollars), the UK Clinical Research Collaboration is currently developing a computer chip that, once urinated or spit on, can be plugged into a phone and can then tell the user whether or not he or she has STDs including herpes, gonorrhea, and chlamydia.

Ultimately, they plan for the chips — which are projected to be the size of a USB chip — to be sold in vending machines for around $0.80 to $1.60, in order to encourage people to perform self-exams who would otherwise avoid an exam because of embarrassment or cost issues.

Well, Microsoft did tell us they were going to tell us something today. And now they’ve told us. It was not, as some had speculated, the near-mythological Microsoft Courier, a tablet computer. Instead it was a new line of phones, oriented at the person who is deeply, deeply into social networking.

Says The Next Web:

Microsoft are quick to point out that this is a completely different offering from Windows Phone 7. Instead of being a smartphone with hundreds of different applications at your disposal, the Kin One and Kin Two exist to keep you in constant contact with friends whilst your on the move, sharing photos, videos and status updates on the go without an app store in sight.

KDDI Research and Development (which is a subsidiary of KDDI, one of Japan’s largest phone companies) has developed a phone that lets your manager know whether you are slacking off. Not by listening in, or by watching with the phone’s camera, but by using software that “learns” your daily routine from the phone’s accelerometer and then reports on when you deviate from the norm.