The Oatmeal’s guide to the ten types of telephone callers.
My line of work renders me too busy to take phone calls. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

At some point this year mobile phone subscriptions will reach the five billion mark, meaning just (yes, just) 1.8 billion people in the world will be without a mobile handset.
Reaching 4.6 billion at the end of 2009, the number of cell phone subscriptions across the globe will hit 5 billion sometime in 2010, according [...]

James Barber’s proposal for a mobile phone designed to last for at least five years, which aims to reduce the numbers of handsets that are currently manufactured:
When you think about the entire energy cost of phones, it’s the manufacturing process that’s the most harmful aspect by far. So reducing the number of phones we [...]

I’m not sure how feasible the proposal actually is, but imagine having a phone number that was like a URL or website address, one number you could retain permanently and (possibly) use regardless of where you lived.
Cell phones can already input web-style addresses and a firmware upgrade would allow for a new system of [...]

In terms of telephone usage Australia is well on the way to becoming a “wireless economy” with the number of mobile phones in use now outstripping land, or fixed, line phones.
For the first time this year, the communications giant Telstra has had more mobile phone subscribers than fixed-line subscribers. Mobile phones now outnumber fixed [...]

Fantastic infographic depicting the history of communication from the time of the invention of Alexander Graham Bell’s “electric” telephone in 1876, through to the arrival of the iPhone in 2007.

I’m not wholly convinced of the merits of naked ADSL, and would much rather go wireless… if only local wireless providers had a stable network hereabouts (which they do, it’s just my particular locational logistics are a tad unusual), meaning the knackered old landline phone stays for now…
I’ve been looking at my knackered old landline [...]

I doubt it is something that anyone has ever given any thought to, how the configuration of numbers on push-button phones was arrived at.
Surprisingly the answer involves focus groups and user testing, a level of customer consultation that is surely unheard of when referring to Telecommunication companies today…
The focus groups were tested on keying [...]

Of the ways to spot that you may be dating someone who is already married, I think it’s time to take the “he/she only gives me his/her mobile number, not their home number” line off the tell-tale list of possible giveaways.
“A bad sign is that he only gives you a cell phone number, not a [...]

The crew at Sony Ericsson recently gave me one of their newest mobile phones, the C902 Cyber-shot to call my own for a couple of months.
Given my love of taking photos I’ve been waiting for a chance to try out the phone’s five mega-pixel camera up at the nearby UNSW campus (where I have a [...]