When you think about the homeless, you likely think about wool blankets, shopping carts and cardboard box shelters. Add the cell phone to that list. According to advocates who work with the district’s homeless, the proportion of homeless people who own and use a cellphone is 30% to 40%.

It seems bizarre, but the gadget once considered a luxury, is now being used by the homeless to keep up with food stamp programs, housing applications and checking emails. There’s also the obvious need for the 911 feature. It makes sense, as a pay as you go phone with 200 minutes can cost about $20 or $30. It’s a lifeline.

Nokia has been pushing music phones very hard and only recently unveiled the XpressMusic 5800 handset in America. Nokia has also announced that its music store is now available in more countries around the world.

The big announcement is three new handsets from Nokia that will be debuting at first in Europe. Among the devices is the 5730 XpressMusic, which is the first Nokia XpressMusic phone to offer a full QWERTY keyboard for messaging. The device can also play N-Gage games on the go and will ship in Q3 2009 for 280 EUR.

When it comes to new phones Europe tends to get them before we do here in America. One of the handsets that was introduced a while back in Europe is the Nokia XpressMusic 5800. The handset didn’t do as well in Europe as Nokia wanted when first launched and the company has now announced that it will be offering the handset in America.

The 5800 will retail for $399 before taxes and subsidies. Nokia hasn’t announced what carriers will be offering the device at this time. The phone will also include a $50 certificate for Amazon’s Video On Demand service.

If you’re a Nokia cell phone user, you’ll want to check out the KIT Eco Charger from Carphone Warehouse, now for sale in the UK for £23. The KIT Eco Charger is a bit different from other chargers in that it can turn itself off automatically once your phone is fully charged. That way, you can leave your handset connected to it as long as you like and not have to worry about wasting electricity. Always a good thing.

According to a company spokesperson, “If everyone in the UK used a KIT Eco Charger we would save approximately 300,000,000 kwh of electricity per year. At an average cost of 28.5p per kwh, that would be a collective saving as a country of £85m!” Sounds pretty good. Sadly not everyone in the UK uses a Nokia.

We knew there must have been some significance to the year 2012 other than the Mayan calendar ending. The GSM Association has announced that it and 17 of it’s partner companies are working a universal cellphone charger solution. They think they will have a common format in place by 2012.

Seems like it should meet the deadline no problem since the group’s choice of connector, micro-USB, has already gained acceptance as a pretty common format. They say that the “majority” of new phones sold by 2012 will support what they’re describing as the universal charging solution, which will need to meet strict requirements to be broadly compatible.

Most camera phone users can agree that the camera is simply not good on the bulk of the devices out there. Even the class leading iPhone has a bad camera that has poor low light performance and is useless as a real camera.

Nokia has officially announced its latest camera phone at MWC 2009 called the Nokia N86 8MP. As you can gather from the name, the handset has an 8-megapixel camera that uses Carl Zeiss optics with built-in flash. Nokia says the camera performs as well as a normal digital camera.

I have never been into social networking, I am far too busy sitting in front of my computer all day working and playing video games to care about the outside world. My wife on the other hand has formed some sort of Vulcan mind meld with MySpace and went into full convulsions when our Internet connection was down.

If you are the type that has to be able to check the status of everyone you know at any given moment on MySpace and you have a mobile phone with Internet connectivity, the social network has announced a new mobile website. MySpace says that it has 20 million users accessing its mobile website each month.

One of the things I want most on my iPhone is expandable memory. Most smartphones include a microSD card slot that allows you to add more storage for music, images, and other files as you need to. Phones that are compatible with microSDHC cards can offer even more storage capacity with a single small card.

Kingston has announced a new microSDHC card that offers 16GB of storage capacity. According to Kingston, that is enough storage for more than 3,000 songs, over 9,000 images at 5-megapixel resolution and more than 16 hours of video.

Chances are you have many chargers on or around your desk, which wouldn’t be a problem if they weren’t all attached to wires. They have a tendency to get all tangled up. The IDAPT Charging Station aims to make your life just a bit neater, while powering up your gadgets.

It’s like a pink gadget orgy charging bed as it can handle three devices simultaneously, and the range of tips available should cover all the popular devices like BlackBerry, Nokia, iPod, PSP etc. You can purchase the tips online if you need one for a gadget. The IDAPT Charging Station will retail for £34.95.

Everyone has a cell phone today, which is why people were so excited when phones gained the ability to take pictures and play music. That meant the majority of us had cameras on us at all times and music players wherever we went.

Nokia has announced a new mobile phone called the N79 Active that adds a new feature that fitness fans will love. The device features a Polar Bluetooth WearLink heart rate belt. The belt sends heart rate data directly to the N79.

This one isn’t rumored to surface at all and we don’t expect to see it at MacWorld 2009. It should arrive eventually though, just because it is well thought out and just makes sense. This concept was born because Mat Brady wants to get rid of his Nokia N95 but won’t buy an iPhone due to the lack of a physical keyboard, no good camera, and not enough storage.

Mat’s concept is called the iPhone Elite. It’s an iPhone with 60GB of storage, true 16:9 aspect ratio, slide-out keyboard, one megapixel front camera for iChat, and another high quality camera, with better lenses, optical zoom, and video capability.

The above picture is just a concept for the moment. Seems like it would be a great redneck device for those creeping around in the backwoods of some southern state. “Hey Cletus. I just shot something.” “Dag nabbit! What’d ya shoot? Did you tie it to a tree and make it squeal like a pig yet?”. Thankfully it doesn’t exist, so that conversation will never be uttered into it.

However, this gun-inspired Nokia phone concept may come in handy for military and law enforcement. Unless it leads to accidental shootings while talking, which it surely would. I would hope the display shows a remaining bullet count as well as phone info.

We covered the Zune Pink project rumor regarding a Zune phone by Microsoft; however, the latest rumors indicate is that the mobile arena isn’t looking at a single Microsoft branded mobile handset, but an instead an entire software and services platform.

The news is that Project Pink may include Zune Mobile support, which may render into a Zune Mobile software package for Windows Mobile that could well be more robust media support than any previous Microsoft powered mobile phone, and could also predict a mobile downloads store.

This 3-in-1 gadget gives you a USB 2.0 compliant 4-port hub, a decorative and completely fake aquarium and it will also hold your cell phone, in case you want it to sleep with the fishes. The device glows when connected and in case you failed to recognize the complete lack of quality, don’t be surprised that it will only cost you $9.99.

It holds fake fish, ocean scenery and a Nokia. With USB ports. What more do you want?

Motorola’s newest music phone, the MOTOROKR EM35 has just been released, and it hopes that you will choose it as your new means of listening to music and handling phone calls. Some features include: CrystalTalk technology, Virtual surround sound, Integrated FM radio, Supports a wide range of audio formats, 3.1 megapixel camera and microSDHC memory card slot.

You can enjoy all the MOTOMUSIC player action you want. The MOTOROKR EM35 will be available before the end of the year. It’s a fairly decent phone. Not bad looking either. But today it’s the N97 that’s getting all the attention.