The number of mobile phones in Britain has broken the 50 million barrier - helped by up to six million text-crazy children. The latest report into the industry by analysts Continental Research revealed yesterday that the 50 million figure was achieved some time during the summer of 2003, but the rate of growth is slowing. Youngsters own an ever-growing number of handsets. Text messaging and, more recently, photo messaging have boomed among younger users, Many of whom own phones discarded by their parents. It is believed about 35 million adults - around seven in 10 of the grown-up population - now own a mobile phone, which leaves another 15 million unaccounted for. The figures are based on subscriptions to monthly contracts and pay-as-you-go sales from the major networks. The 15 million will include many 'second' phones in families where people have one phone for work and one for pleasure.
It is believed up to two in three secondary school children now have mobiles, as well as one in four primary school pupils, aged four to 11.Britons now send 42 million text messages a day – more than double the total a year ago. Poor spelling and punctuation in exams has a long history. Examiners' reports from the 1800s complain about students' mistakes. This year's continuation of tales of grammatical woe have been coloured by the introduction of text message style writing into supposedly formal examination answers.
Some essays were peppered with soap opera phrases ("I was well bored") or written entirely in text message shorthand, which is proving a challenge for markers. Senior English examiner Anne Barnes said: "The thought and quality of the answer has to be balanced against the fact that it is not Standard English when it should be."
Mobile phones, computers and other such gadgets in the bedroom are seriously disrupting the sleeping patterns of a growing number of children, a study has found. Reading a book under the bedclothes with a torch has now been replaced by insidious distractions such as video games and mobile phones used for late-night text messages. A survey of more than 2,500 teenagers found that many of them were losing sleep, particularly as a result of the boom in the popularity of "texting" with mobile phones.
Jan Van den Bulck, a senior lecturer in psychology at the Catholic university of Leuven in Belgium, found that text messages interrupted the sleep of most adolescents and that up to 1 in 5 said they were wakened regularly by friends texting late at night.
Dr Van den Bulck said: "these preliminary findings suggest that mobile telephones may be having a major impact on the quality of sleep of a growing number of adolescents. The threat to healthy sleep patterns is potentially more important than the threat posed by entertainment media. The latter mainly appear to influence time to bed, while mobile phones actually seem to lead to interrupted sleep.
"It's not so much whether they are disturbed in their sleep by being awakened. If they take their phone with them and leave it switched on, they sleep at a different level because they are constantly aware of the phone."
Mobile phones in the teenager population seem to cause more trouble than they should. If mobile phones were only used for emergences then they wouldn’t cause so much of a problem. The lack of sleep and “text” writing in exams may cause too much of a problem in school and may make their grades decrease. In conclusion I believe that mobile phones are more of a cure in modern society.
