Cellular Telephones

Karl Goetz looked at his Prada-branded cellphone Friday morning and saw a message he had never seen before. "Rejected connection." It was another way of saying his high-end phone was suddenly as useful for making calls as a pair of Prada pumps. But fashion was not to blame. The problem was with the premium cellphone service Voce, which mysteriously shut down Friday.

Qualcomm Inc. overtook Texas Instruments Inc. to become the largest maker of chips for mobile phones last year as customers used more of its semiconductors for devices that surf the Web and download videos. Sales of Qualcomm phone chips rose to $5.5 billion in 2007, compared with about $5 billion for Texas Instruments, which had dominated the market since the 1990s, said Will Strauss, an analyst at Forward Concepts Co. in Tempe, Ariz.

A fleet of 100 cars rolled onto a Bay Area interstate Friday to begin perfecting a tool that could one day transform the lives of commuters around the world. Maybe. With San Francisco Bay shimmering to the west, university students drove the cars all day back and forth along Interstate 880. Each was carrying a cellphone loaded with Global Positioning System software. And as they drove, it beamed back signals that researchers shaped into a real-time map of traffic speeds.

Sharon Vaughan had been warned that cellphone reception was notoriously bad in this wealthy Central Coast town of art boutiques and touristy shops selling pottery and seashells. But the reality of cellularless living didn't really sink in until she moved to her first apartment in town two years ago. "The only place I could get a call out was on a wooden deck outside my apartment," said Vaughan, a restaurant manager at Cambria Pines Lodge.

Viacom Inc.'s Paramount studio is starting a unit for delivering entertainment on mobile devices. Paramount said it had appointed executives to head the unit in North America, Asia and Europe.

The last thing the world needs is another social network that lets users chat with their friends, the head of Yahoo Inc.'s mobile Internet business said. What users need is a way to keep track of all of them. "Today, most people have too many forms of communications," said Marco Boerries, senior vice president of Yahoo's Connected Life unit. "To keep in touch with all of them, you have to go to all of these different websites."

If you've got an appetite for talking on mobile phones, major cellphone companies are ready to give you all you can eat. Three of the nation's largest mobile phone carriers said Tuesday that they would offer unlimited domestic calling for a flat $100 a month, raising the possibility of a price war and the likelihood that customers finally might be able to understand their bills. Verizon Wireless was the first to announce the new option early Tuesday, followed quickly by AT&T Inc.

UCLA's neuropsychiatric hospital has banned all cellphones and laptop computers after a patient posted group photos of other patients on a social networking website, officials confirmed Monday. Dr. Thomas Strouse, medical director of the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, said in a statement that the decision was part of "UCLA Health System's ongoing efforts to enhance patient privacy and confidentiality in compliance with California's patient rights law."

Sprint Nextel Corp.'s Boost Mobile, a service provider that targets young adults, began selling advertisements on its phones to bolster sales. Boost will initially display ads from News Corp.'s Fox Searchlight Pictures and Honda Motor Corp.'s Acura line. The promotions will appear in software for Internet access and music downloads.

When she whipped out her iPhone, Erica Sadum could feel her husband's eyes roll. But she had a point to prove. And in less than a minute, she was able to report to the skeptics around the dinner table that Menno Simons, whose followers are known as Mennonites, was in fact born in 1496. Apple Inc.'s iPhone, which went on sale nine months ago, isn't the only so-called smart phone that provides itinerant access to the Web.