New cell phone to prevent drunk dialing
June 28, 2006 6:14 AM PDT
There just might be no other gadget that has transformed the party scene quite as much as the cell phone. Address books and text-messaging can beef up the attendance of a slow night within minutes. Camera and video features have proven to quite a few of us that no one is safe from having their embarrassing acts--from women dancing on tables to men being caught with cosmopolitans or Smirnoff Ices in hand--captured on digital video.
But the Korean cell phone manufacturer LG Electronics, according to ABC News, has gone a step further with the party gimmicks. LG's LP4100 brand, to be released in the U.S. later this year, not only takes pictures of your friends' bar tricks, it can also ward off two of a wild Saturday night's most undesirable consequences--drunk dialing and DUIs.
The LP4100 has a built-in breath analyzer that, when blown into by an intoxicated partier, gives a warning and displays a nifty little animation of a car swerving on a road and crashing into traffic cones. (Which should be easy for even the tipsy mind to understand.)
The phone can also be programmed to block selected numbers in the address book--bosses, moms, exes, pizzerias--if the breath analyzer records a blood-alcohol concentration over 0.08.
It's already a hit in Korea, where more than 200,000 of LG's Breathalyzer-type phones have been sold.
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