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It's tough being a man in this tech-obsessed world we live in. Doctors now believe that the average male's ability to father children could be determined by how much time he spends using his mobile phone.
It seems that either the heat generated by an active mobile or the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the handset zaps sperm, leading to infertility among heavy mobile phone users.
The research suggests millions may have difficulty in fathering a child due to the widespread use of mobile phones and while that seems a little bit alarmist, the reality is that we are going to be using our mobiles more than ever in the coming years. The prospects for world fertility don't look good.
A couple of things are driving increased mobile usage. Key is the push by players like Vodafone to make your mobile the phone you use for calls at home and on the move. All-you-can-eat calling plans are already common in the US and Europe and are starting to take off here.
The other thing pushing up mobile use is the greater functionality of handsets and the new services they support.
Vodafone now has a network that can deliver data at up to 3.6Mbps (megabits per second). At transfer rates even half of that, good quality video and audio can be sent to mobile phones very quickly.
The big growth area in mobiles is in music. Nokia plans to sell 80 million phones this year that incorporate music players. In the past quarter, Apple sold 8.7 million iPods. Music phones are hugely outstripping sales of stand-alone music players and the better design of music phones may see them make their mark next year. You'd still be advised to look for a phone with an SD Micro or Memory Stick card slot to add memory for music. We're also starting to see phones such as the Motorola V6 Maxx and the Samsung Blade with dedicated multimedia buttons. No longer do you have to delve into your phone's menu just to play a song.
But until prices for music downloads drop and users can transfer from their phones to their computers, music downloads will remain an expensive novelty. Instead, we're likely to see the rise of mobile radio stations, where music is streamed out via the mobile network to listeners. The Sony Ericsson V630i is designed with this mobile deejay system in mind.
Accessing email on the mobile will become much more common next year. Google has released a mobile phone client for its Gmail service and other webmail providers are doing the same.
A little-used mobile phone feature likely to gain traction next year is instant messaging. Vodafone and other players are collaborating to create a compatible system for instant messaging. The boom in instant messaging on mobile will be accompanied by new handset models that incorporate miniature, full-qwerty keyboards to make typing easier and handwriting recognition for writing directly onto the touch screen.
Windows Live Messenger is already provided as a dedicated mobile service by overseas operators.
There's plenty on offer in mobile phones these days and more to come. Just don't stay on the air too long, especially if you plan to start a family.
