I think Connie Willis tried to deal with the ubiquity of pagers and cell phones and such in Passage, and wasn't altogether successful. No wonder her next novel takes place during the Blitz.

I have another classic plot device in mind that can be made more interesting by the advent of the cell phone, but I'm not telling, because I know all you knife-wielding monkeys are out to steal my ideas.

Jar of Tang story, right?

“Hey, Phil, it’s Joe — somebody sapped me on the way home from the bar last night — no kidding — and I just woke up in the middle of the desert — No, I don’t know which desert, that’s why I’m calling... 40° north, 89° west... Peoria?? — What do you mean, ‘The 7-11 on Jefferson Avenue’?”

I thought it was a Circle K, but I'm not about to drive out check.

Hey! Not all of us monkeys wield knives. I'm quite fond of my blunderbuss, thank you very much.

I think I've seen a fair number of stories and movies in the last couple years wherein someone leaves their cell phone at home. It's still pretty plausible, I think, for the moment -- I know a lot of people who own cell phones but don't often carry them -- but agreed that it'll get less plausible over time. And even if it's plausible, it does still feel like author cheating to me.

I think you're glossing over a key point re today's mobile phone situation, though: cell phone coverage is spotty at best, even in Silicon Valley, and satellite phones are still (I think) rare and expensive and bulky. It's not at all implausible (for now) to have a character with a cell phone be in an area with little or no cell phone coverage, as long as it's not downtown in a major American city.

I wonder how long it'll be before there's legislation introduced to make it illegal to disable the GPS system built into your phone. (Once such systems are commonplace.) Major civil-rights implications, of course, but I bet it could get a fair number of votes for the public-safety implications. Imagine if every 911 call came with GPS coordinates.... And if search-and-rescue teams could find lost hikers by pinging their cell phones.

There's always another option: cellphone jammers. They're illegal in the US, but not in other places. Like, say, Europe and parts beyond. I believe there they're used in restaurants and movie theaters. Read somewhere last year that Khaddafi travels around Libya with a heavy duty cellphone jammer constantly broadcasting, just to reduce his risk of assassination. And if he needs to call out, he can just turn it off.

As for me, I'd like to have one operating in our library. Probably block the wireless network, tho'.

Wasn't there a law passed a couple of years ago that required all commercially available GPS systems in the US to be de-calibrated such that they show between 50 and 300 ft off of where you actually are? The impetus was finding that enemy soldiers were using cheapie GPS systems that they picked up from Radio Shack.

It’s called “selective availability” and it’s not the receivers, it’s the satellite signal itself, so it can be turned on or off globally. It was turned off in 2000. I suppose the worry that it might be turned on again is one of the motivations behind the European / Russian construction of a parallel system, though I don’t think it’s really that likely.

What I need is a GPS handheld that gives me the coords of my cell phone.

Ah, but the flip side is that this opens up the posisbility for more interesting apocalyptic plots: in a world where everyone depends on the GPS, what happens when the GPS system fails?