The same tiny gizmos that deploy air bags in cars could soon make cell phones less cumbersome to use. Several academic and corporate labs are developing ways to use ultrasmall accelerometers and gyroscopes-which sense a car's sudden deceleration during a crash and trigger the air bags-in the guts of cell phones and other handheld devices. This makes common tasks, such as scrolling through lists, entering numbers, and moving information from one place to another, much easier; you simply tilt the gadget in various directions.

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