In a new survey out yesterday in Tokyo, mobile phones are quickly becoming a keepsake representing a small section of your life, and users keep using them even after the phone has outlived its "communicative" capability.
As our phones get older (and we get older with them), throwing away your mobile phone is beginning to show all the emotional drawbacks of losing something or someone dear. The Telecommunications Carriers Association's mobile phone recycling survey found Japanese keeping the phones as part of a mobile phone "collection", for "data saving purposes", and finally "worries about data privacy".
There must be other ways of combining this information as you pass from one handset to another, free photo album services offered by the mobile phone carrier partners via the loyalty point system (keeping them on the network with their new phones too)... but it is plainly clear that the proximity with the mobile phone is set to become more and more part of our social and emotional fabric than we can even imagine today.
