Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/27/gun_phone/

The world's most deadly handset?

Gun-cum-caller

By James Sherwood

Posted in Personal Tech, 27th November 2008 12:16 GMT

Brain tumours from excessive cellphone use shouldn’t be your first health concern any longer, because if the man standing next to you looks like Al Capone’s cousin and he’s making a call on his mobile then you’d best leg it.

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Why? Because police recently raided a house in Italy - thought to be connected with the Naples-based mafia – where they found a gun cunningly concealed within a mobile phone.

As the video shows, the phone slides open to allow four bullets - .22 calibre, we believe – to be slotted inside. Pressing the right key combination then lets the caller fire shots through the fake talker’s antenna.

Register Hardware’s a little sceptical that the phone would fool many people though, because it looks like something out of the early 1990s. It's also about the size of a brick, has a tiny static display and its buttons are the size of 1p coins.

But provided it does the job, the... er... 'end user' won’t complain. It would be nice if it actually made calls and was 3G-enabled, though...