I met today with the makers of Cellstik, a cute little gadget that backs up your cellphone's phone book in case you lose your phone, you want to transfer your contacts to another phone, or you want to edit them on your PC and return them to your phone. It's extremely easy to use, looks like a USB key, and costs only $39.99. Plug one end into your phone, press one button, and pow - you're backed up. Plug the other end into your PC, and you can edit your phone book with some very basic included software.

You can buy Cellstiks for Motorola, Samsung and LG phones right now, with Nokia and Sanyo coming soon; the ability to back up other info from your phone, like pictures and ringtones, will come in a new version next year.

The neatest thing about Cellstik from a techie's perspective is that it saves the phone numbers in an unencrypted, comma-delimited text format on the stick, which is really a 128K flash drive with some built-in software. So even though the stick only comes with a basic app for editing the phone books and transferring them to another stick, you could easily import the data into a program of your choice or use it with unsupported OSes like Mac OS and Linux. Cellstik's selling point is ease of use, but I hope techier types will reward its use of open standards by writing their own Cellstik plug-ins for popular applications and OSes.