The nonprofit National Safety Council on Monday called on all U.S. states to ban the use of cell phones while driving.

The NSC, which says it counts 55,000 companies as members, compared talking or texting while driving to drunken driving and urged states to ban even the use of phones with hands-free kits.

No state has completely banned cell-phone use while driving, though 23 have passed some form of restriction.....

Rumors that Apple has a scaled-down iPhone dubbed the "iPhone nano" in the works have lurched forward following a report here that two Taiwanese companies are set to supply chips for the phone.

According to DigiTimes, the two purported chip suppliers are the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC).....

DigiTimes also reported that "the launch of Apple's iPhone nano is expected to take place in June this year at the earliest."

UK market watcher Generator Research (GR) has suggested Apple could knock Nokia off the world smartphone maker top spot within four years.

By 2013, it forecast, Apple's iPhone line - by then expanded with a range of models - could have won a global marketshare of around 40 per cent. That's what Nokia currently enjoys. But the Finnish giant's share could halve by 2013, according to GR's analysis.

After suffering through virtual beer drinking, boobs and farts, Apple's iPhone gets a new unique entertainment application dubbed iSteam. It turns your device into a foggy glass surface, perfectly mimicking a mirror after a hot shower. It will have earned a bunch of 22-year old kids $100,000 in one month, having already created a cult-like following and generating over 1 million downloads. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why it took iSteam barely a week since its December 30 release to overtake iBeer, iFart, Pull My finger, Ocarina, Whoopies Cushion and Zephyr to become #1 entertainment application in the App Store.....

Not long after I returned from a recent trip to Canada, I was surprised to find a $400 cell phone bill in the mailbox. This seemed odd because I'd made only two phone calls when I was there, the longer one for 15 minutes.

But when I looked closer at the breakdown, I saw what was going on. It wasn't I who'd been making dozens of long-distance calls back to the States - it was the phone itself. While I thought my iPhone was sitting "unused" in my jacket, it had been constantly checking my e-mail for 72 consecutive hours.....

I was pretty harsh on Microsoft and Apple last week with regard to their various pitches. On Apple's side, it really didn't have that much to present and, given the content, I doubt anyone else would have done better. But then it was Apple, and Apple isn't expected to be just anyone else. Several folks have spoken to me about the Microsoft CES keynote, saying that it was Microsoft, after all, so I should have lowered my expectations. Maybe so, but in these hard times it is critical that companies step up and create excitement. Otherwise, these hard times are likely to be with us a lot longer.

Fortunately, Palm, in sharp contrast to much of what was at CES, got up on stage and went for the gold. It set a standard that every other company at CES should try to emulate. It brought to market the Palm Pre, a product that did what the iPhone did two years ago and stole the show. And Palm did this largely by emulating Apple.....

Before I gave in and started using an iPhone, I was a stalwart Palm supporter. In the late '90s, I was actually a beta tester for the very first Pilot 1000 device. It was light years ahead of what anyone else was doing at the time, and it "just worked."....

....Last week at CES, Palm announced a new operating system, called Web OS, and the first device to run it, the Pre. It also announced an application store, called Pre Catalog. And that's when things got very interesting: the Pre blew everyone away.....

As it turned out, Palm hit what appears to be a grand slam. Palm has a competitor to the iPhone and the G1. For the first time in years, gadget fans were drooling over a Palm device.....

In short, Palm went from a company that nobody cared about to a leader in the smartphone field overnight......

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