If someone brought sat phones to the island, why don't they call someone to come rescue them?

I'm really hoping that you just forgot the "sarcasm" tag from this entry. Who on earth thought that there'd be a market for touchscreen sat-phones?

And as far as the tracking thing goes, you obviously didn't pay enough attention when watching the show last time. That Faraday dude (daniel?) said that the Ship was actually sending them the gps coordinates of the gps trackers that the other freightees(?) were wearing. So the phone just displayed the data, nothing more.

They're "fictional" now. So were most non-satellite cell touch screens two years ago. I highly doubt they'll still be "fictional" by the time Lost ends it's run in 2010.

Interesting. I don't watch Lost so I don't really have a comment specifically to it. But I've noticed another thing that TV shows and movies consistently tend to do. Whenever characters in a show/movie at tracing a call, either to a bad guy or whoever else, they always try to keep the person on the phone for a certain amount of time so they can get the trace. It always takes some time, and if the person hangs up, they are screwed.

I've asked people in the criminal justice/law enforcement field, as well as other technology savvy individuals, and all of them agree that what you see in TV/movies is incorrect. They all have told me that the trace happens immediately, even with cell phones which use service provider towers to estimate where the cell phone is.. usually down to a pretty exact (or close to exact) location. If just a regular old police station can do this, how come such technologically advanced fictional agencies such as CTU (24) can't do this?

To look past this, I usually just attribute it to the fact that the "bad guys" must be using some uber crazy encryption that makes it so regular traces don't work. But they seem to do this even in movies and shows that don't have as high-tech criminals as 24.. where there is no indication that the criminals are using any special untraceable phones.

Anyways, always thought this was interesting, and kind of weird that even today's day and age of instant tracing, TV shows and movies are still playing up the whole "keep the bad guy on the phone for a few minutes" bit.

Garmin has GPS units that double as walkie-talkies that also transmit one's location. So I don't see that it's that far fetched.

Barack Obama is spell with a C, not Barak.

As we saw in last week's episode, time may be moving slower on the island. Maybe those phones are from the *future*