New phones back many features

They include small sizes, unusual shapes, flip tops, colour screens, even joysticks as navigational devices.

Add to this list easy to rotate skins, or external cases, with different colours and textures.

This ability to change a phone's appearance not only allows users to play with and accentuate their mobile's design, it also enables phone companies to sell a wide range of add-on products at what is likely to be a considerable mark-up and profit.

Further phone features that accentuate lifestyle and design above the technology enabling them include voice-activated dialling, mini-cameras and radios.

Packed with features

Of course, this attention to product design does not imply that technological innovations in cellular phones are not emerging, expanding the market and attracting users.

Barrier blurred between phones and handheld PCs

Options and features such as Wap, GPRS, Tri-band and a version of I-Mode in the US are being launched or refined.

Keeping track of all of this is a constant group of early adopters keen to announce they are on top of the latest trend by flashing their newest gadget.

But even this audience does not seem to be purchasing the latest mobile features as they have in the past - even in the technological hothouse that is the Japanese market.

By emphasising a mobile phone as a piece of design, the phone manufacturers aim to get users to change their thinking about how cell phones fit into their lives.

Instead of being seen as a technology appliance permitting people to carry out a task, the phone becomes a fashion statement asserting the taste and style of the user.

The really successful design can even achieve another status entirely: the fetish object.