Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring, Mosquitophone...

The phone so cool that only kids can hear it!

In that old battle of the wills between young people and their keepers, the young have found a new weapon that could change the balance of power on the cellphone front: a ring tone that many adults cannot hear.

In settings where cellphone use is forbidden — in class, for example — it is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species.

(snip)

The [adult-inaudible ringtone] was the offshoot of an invention called the Mosquito, developed last year by a Welsh security company to annoy teenagers and gratify adults, not the other way around.

It was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz buzzer designed to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected.

The principle behind it is a biological reality that hearing experts refer to as presbycusis, or aging ear....

While most human communication takes place in a frequency range between 200 and 8,000 hertz... most adults' ability to hear frequencies higher than that begins to deteriorate in early middle age.

Pretty neat, but it's no Bananaphone. On the plus side, Mosquitophone is almost certainly free of Bananaphone's deadly side effects.

(Now if they could only figure out a way to make cellphone conversations inaudible, too...)