So, if you really can't put your smartphone down, not even when you're walking down a crowded shopping street, and you're fed up with bumping into people while constantly typing messages on your phone (or other people are fed up with bumping into you because you are constantly typing messages on your phone), a Belgian city came up with an almost-perfect solution for you! 

As the Chinese and the Americans before them, the Belgians also marked their streets with designated white text-walking lanes for mobile phone addicts. Mlab, a local smartphone specialist, developed the idea when he realized there are many people who 'textwalk' regularly only to crash into other people (or street poles and lamps, that's even worse), dropping and trashing their devices as a result.

It seems like a pretty good solution, but the busy streets of Antwerp tend to be narrow with lots of more or less predictable corners to avoid. It may still be a little tricky navigating safely through these text-walking lanes, even though the lanes are clearly marked. That is, if you can't keep your eyes away from the screen.

According to data from digital analysts at GSMA Intelligence, it's official. There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people. At the moment of writing, GSMA's Real-Time Tracker shows over 7.5 billion mobile connections and over 3.7 billion unique mobile subscribers. Global population is estimated at 7.2 billion.

June 19, 2015 Living photo: Mlab

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