cellular network

If Mae West were alive today, the blond bombshell might be asking her dates, "Is that a PC in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" With each new generation of smartphones, that question is getting harder to answer.

When David Teater's 12-year-old son, Joe, was killed in 2004 by a driver who was talking on a cell phone, he tried to cut back on his own habit of driving and talking. It turned out to be very difficult.

"You have to remember to turn the phone off ... which you never remember to do. Or you have to ignore a ringing phone, which is incredibly hard," Teater said. "We've been conditioned our entire lives to answer ringing phones."

Teater became an advocate for curbing what he calls "driving while distracted," and now, he's part of a company with a technology that can help.

Want to break into the computer network in an ultra-secure building? Ship a hacked iPhone there to a nonexistent employee and hope the device sits in the mailroom, scanning for nearby wireless connections.

How about stealing someone's computer passwords? Forget trying to fool the person into downloading a malicious program that logs keystrokes. A tiny microphone hidden near the keyboard could do the same thing, since each keystroke emits slightly different sounds that can be used to reconstruct the words the target is typing.

On Monday, Apple introduced a new service that delivers push e-mail, push contacts and push calendars into the "cloud" of native applications on the iPhone, iPod touch, Macs and PCs.

Dubbed MobileMe, the service also provides a suite of ad-free Web applications that aim to deliver a desktop-like experience through any modern browser.

MobileMe applications -- available at www.me.com -- include Mail, Contacts and Calendar, as well as Gallery for viewing and sharing photos and iDisk for storing and exchanging documents online.

A 3G iPhone is the Apple of the wireless world's eye. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was expected to announce the iPhone 2.0 Monday at the opening of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Along with January's MacWorld event, WWDC is a natural venue for blockbuster announcements. Apple, as usual, has been tight-lipped about the final features and pricing for the 3G iPhone, but speculation abounds.

In another step in the worldwide march of Apple Inc.'s iPhone, the top mobile phone operator in Latin America said Wednesday that it has inked a deal to bring the multimedia gadget to more than a dozen countries starting later this year.

America Movil SAB, controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, said it plans to bring the iPhone to all of its Latin American operations but didn't offer more details about the arrangement, including whether it would be the exclusive iPhone provider in the targeted countries.