One thing that has been a concert going tradition as long at power ballads have been around is holding your cigarette lighter above your head with the flame going. This can be a problem if you want to partake in the tradition but don’t smoke. Zippo has just the thing for non-smokers who want to participate.

Zippo and software firm Moderati have launched a new App for the iPhone that is available free on the Apple App Store. The application is called the Virtual Zippo Lighter and will work on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Forget about your sleek iPhones and your Samsungs and Nokias. Here’s a phone you can rock like it’s 1899. This steampunk phone is a prototype by Arthur Schmitt, a modern day Londoner, not a Londoner from Victorian times.

It sports a wire cover over the earpiece, period gauges, visible screws, a spinning number-counter and more. Perhaps the coolest detail is that it uses punch cards and binary phone numbers to control the phone’s features and make calls. Now that’s progress that makes phonebooks look like rolodex’s. “Can you hear me through me amazingly thick mustache now?”

With everything kids have going on today, it’s often easier to get them a cell phone so you can keep in touch at all times. Even young kids age five and up use cell phones today. They are a great way for parents to know where the kids are, even if they are just down the street.

The catch is that kids don’t understand that using a cell phone too much or downloading things from the Internet can run up a bill significantly. You also have to worry that they could be subject to inappropriate calls from unknown users. Firefly has had a phone specifically made for kids on the market since 2006.

The Samsung Haptic 2 mobile phone is currently available in 4GB and 16GB flavors. The mobile phone features a 3.2-Inch LCD touch screen, DMB, e-dictionary, Bluetooth, and 5MP camera. The handset also comes with a new User Interface that lets users create their own vibration mode to be used for either good or evil, and create various personal screen designs with 50 icons. The Samsung Haptic 2 is priced between €480 and €550.

Porsche is a name associated with two things, style and speed. The new P’9522 arguably has plenty of style (though I don’t see it), but it sports a Wi-Fi web connection instead of a 3G network.

With your powered down connection you’ll also get a 5 Megapixel camera, touch screen, and built in GPS. Apparently forged from a single block of brushed aluminum and a glass plate, this one is for the rich set. People who won’t care about speed as much as making impressions. It ships in November and looks like it will sell for aout $875.

The HTC Touch Diamond just got a new color, and it will be available in white. That’s right. The most boring device color known to man. The eternal white limbo that the Wii is damned to walk the Earth wearing. The new color will be available on store shelves this October, but other than the color change, everything beneath the hood is the same. Will it remain white or is the quality such that it will turn yellow after a few years? I have no idea, but I’m sure most of you want neither white nor yellow. Colorware to the rescue!

The LT2 Mickey Mouse phone is for beautiful little fairy princesses who have wished upon a star for their parents to search for Chinese knockoffs on the internet. At least it looks kinda nice. It has the whole Mickey theme happening, 2.0-inch 262k TFT touch screen, 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, microSD slot, FM radio and all the other basic functions, even a currency convertor for when your folks buy more junk, a to-do list, world clock, unit converter, health test, and calculator. The LT2 Mickey phone can be yours for $142.82.

Check out this shot of an Asus device that might challenge the Samsung Omnia when it’s released. Apparently it’s called the Asus Glaxy7. It runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro and the display looks very similar to the Omnia. Other features are a 3.5 “WVGA 800X480 / 65K Color TFT, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, microSD memory card slot, mini-USB, 200 hours standby, 4 hours talk time, and a trackball that acts like a D-pad. On the back is a 5 megapixel camera with no flash for low light conditions.

One of a slew of new mobile phones announced by Sprint this week is the very hip looking LG Lotus. It will be available in October for around $150 with a two-year contract.

The LG Lotus is described as being a full QWERTY flip phone with a squarish shape and two color options – purple or black. It is one of the first Sprint phones to support the mobile carrier’s new One Click feature. One Click allows you to personalize the home screen of the Lotus “by selecting and organizing features and content such as text messaging, Google search, Sprint Navigation, email, favorite Web sites, music, and call log” so they can be included in the display. One sees all of this information through a customizable carousel-style menu.

Mobile phones are one of the most ubiquitous pieces of gadgetry around. It doesn’t matter if people are into gadgets and electronics or not — most everyone wants a cell phone. As more and more features are being offered like, over-the-air downloads, faster connections speeds are wanted by many users.

Virgin Mobile USA has announced its first EV-DO handset that offers much faster data speeds. The handset is called the Shuttle and comes to Virgin Mobile USA by way of its purchase of Helio. The handset will be available on September 28 for $79.99.

Cliff Kushler is the inventor of T9 Keyboard technology, and now he has another revolutionary technology that will make texting even easier. It’s called Swype is as simple as tapping on your touch screen and sliding your stylus/finger to all the letters of a word and lifting after each word is finished. It’s smart thanks to a built-in 65,000-word dictionary that corrects obvious spelling errors. If there are alternate options, a word menu pops up. A nudge upwards will capitalize the words, and a wiggle will allow for double letter entry.

This will make many users lives easier. The technology was developed with Windows Mobile, the tablet version of XP and Vista, and Surface in mind, but the iPhone could really use it. Kushler says he can type 55 words per minute using it. Everyday users may not fair that well, but it will still be easy to use.

As it turns out, the iPhone is a very good mobile gaming platform. It offers good controls for most games and great graphics for a mobile phone. Gaming on the iPhone always makes me think of a sort of mobile Wii with the built-in accelerometer making for some interesting gameplay.

EA Mobile has announced that Spore Origins will be shipping for the iPhone, iPod and other mobile devices this month. The game was designed to take advantage of the iPhone accelerometer allowing the player to turn, tilt, and twist the phone to control the creature on screen.

We love our gadgets small, but sometimes it can get ridiculous. You are looking at the world’s smallest cell phone. The Xun Chi 138. It has a 1.3 megapixel camera, a touch screen with hand writing recognition, mp3 player and GPRS capabilities. It weighs just 55grams and measures a tiny 2.64 inches in length. It’s described as a “dual band GSM phone that supports GSM networks in Europe, Australia and parts of Asia, but does not work on North American GSM networks such as Cingular/Cellular One, T-Mobile, Rogers, Fido/Microcell, SunCom, Dobson, Edge Wireless, Alltel, Petrocom, Union, Pegaso/Movistar, Radiomovil/Telcel etc.” As you can see it’s ridiculously tiny, about the same size as a AA battery. Mini-Me would probably dig it, but some of us already have trouble with the buttons on our normal sized phones.

Chinavision is at it again, offering up a strange dual band smartphone that is part Nokia phone and part iPhone, with a projector thrown in for good measure. Features an interactive touchscreen, WAP, bluetooth, and a 1800mAh battery for extra long talk time between charges, MP3 and MP4 player, 1.3mp Digital Camera, Image Viewer, Video Recorder, and rich media environment messaging options, micro SD card slot complete with a 1GB card.

The projector can be used from a distance of up to 5 feet and will project an image about 32 x 40 inches. It should be “available soon”. I hope they aren’t waiting for the green light from Nokia and Apple.

Nokia released several new Nseries mobiles this week. The Nokia N79 is one of these and it’s coming to Europe this October – no specific American release information was made available.

The Nokia N79, according to its maker, offers up quite a lot of features for the multimedia inclined. This include, in a nutshell, “integrated navigation, music with FM transmitter, high-speed connectivity, superior web browsing, at least 10 pre-loaded N-Gage games and an advanced 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics.” It also combines 3.5G HSDPA and Wi-Fi wireless support.