Kid phone fashionistas

Having a cellphone is something of a fashion statement or status symbol for US 8-to-12-year-olds. For many of their parents, it's something of a security blanket, the New York Times reports, in a thoughtful trend piece. Of course, what's fashionable changes pretty fast in that age group, since the children, the tech, and the coolness factor are all changing at once. Here are some numbers: Nearly a third of this age group had cellphones by the end of last year (about 6.6 million out of 20 million), the Times cites Yankee Group figures as showing. It projects that'll be 10.5 million preteen phone owners by 2010. For eight-year-olds, the number more than doubled over the past four years and for 9-year-olds it went from 501,000 to 1.25 million in that time period.