Among mobile phone users' Seven Deadly Sins, the Sin of Preening Phone Pride is surely near the top. Here are some of the best bits from a short but provocative article in a recent edition of the Economist:
"Parks beautifully," boasts an advertising hoarding for the XDA II, above a glimpse of its sleek silver lines. “Responsive to every turn”, declares another poster. Yet these ads, seen recently in London, are selling not a car, but an advanced kind of mobile phone. Maybe that should not be a surprise. Using automotive imagery to sell a handset makes a lot of sense for, in many respects, mobile phones are replacing cars.
Phones are now the dominant technology with which young people, and urban youth in particular, now define themselves. What sort of phone you carry and how you customise it says a great deal about you, just as the choice of car did for a previous generation. In today's congested cities, you can no longer make a statement by pulling up outside a bar in a particular kind of car. Instead, you make a similar statement by displaying your mobile phone, with its carefully chosen ringtone, screen logo and slip cover. Mobile phones, like cars, are fashion items: in both cases, people buy new ones far more often than is actually necessary. Both are social technologies that bring people together; for teenagers, both act as symbols of independence. And cars and phones alike promote freedom and mobility, with unexpected social consequences.
The design of both cars and phones started off being defined by something that was no longer there. Cars were originally horseless carriages, and early models looked suitably carriage-like; only later did car designers realise that cars could be almost any shape they wanted to make them. Similarly, mobile phones used to look much like the push-button type of fixed-line phones, only without the wire. But now they come in a bewildering range of strange shapes and sizes.
Less visibly, as the structure of the mobile-phone industry changes, it increasingly resembles that of the car industry. Handset-makers, like carmakers, build some models themselves and outsource the design and manufacturing of others. Specialist firms supply particular sub-assemblies in both industries. Outwardly different products are built on a handful of common underlying “platforms” in both industries, to reduce costs. In each case, branding and design are becoming more important as the underlying technology becomes increasingly interchangeable. 
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