“Huh? Whose phone is this?”

“Mine.”

“NU-uh.”

“Yeah. I just bought it from a friend.”

Julie picked up Katy’s blue and silver Sprint LG wireless phone and flipped it up.

“This is cool. I want one,” Julie said, examining the phone.

It had been a year and a half since Katy and her two sisters got their basic black Ericsson phones as part of our cell phone service.

But phones have come a long way in 18 months.

“My friends were making fun of me,” Katy said, explaining one reason she bought her new one.

Her new phone, once she starts up service, will have wireless Web capabilities, a calendar and games, a variety of rings and a phone book.

As the girls talked about all the new options available on her phone and phones of their friends, I decided to take a look at what some of the newest phones are capable of doing.

Tetris and Pong

Motorola offers a lot of features and accessories you can add to its new T720i phone ($450). You can pick out your favorite ring tone and get graphics, such as wallpaper and screensavers, for your screen display.

You also can pay for additional software, such as a clock face display, a note pad for storing simple notes or a calculator.

Want games?

You can get about 15 games, for $5 each, which include Tetris, MotoGP (a motorcycle racing game), Stuntman, Casino Pack, a classic arcade-style game called Defender, Breakout (a ball and paddle game) and even Pong.

If you want to go a step further, you can get a tiny attachable digital camera that will store up to 48 digital images.

Even video

Nokia’s 3650 phone, which is expected to be available later this year, not only offers photos, but also a video recorder that lets you download and play video clips and movie trailers in RealMedia format. You also can record and send memos, conversations and sound clips in RealAudio format.

One of my favorite models is the Nokia Communicator 9290 ($599), which opens up to reveal a full keyboard and a horizontal screen. You can fax, send short messages, get e-mail, connect to a digital camera, connect to the Web and buy additional software. But it’s a little big compared to some of the other phones out there — 6.22 inches long, about an inch thick and 2.2 inches wide.

Joystick

I also took a look at the Sony Ericsson T68i ($319), which has a joystick you can use for drawing pictures or playing games.

The T68i has a digital camera that lets you take and send photos. It has a picture phone book that lets you add a photo to your phone number lists. And it has Bluetooth technology, which allows you to connect wirelessly to a headset for hands-free talking.

Other features include e-mail, text messaging, multimedia messaging and a full calendar that will synch up with your PC’s calendar.

The T68i also serves as a modem that lets you hook up your laptop or PDA to the Internet through a high speed “always on” GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) that transfers data, theoretically, up to 171.2 kilobits per second.

Back to the basics

The girls were laughing.

“No, no, not that PDA. What do you think about the other PDA — personal digital assistants?” I asked.

Even though Julie had a phone pressed to her ear, she eagerly joined in about the pros and cons of a hybrid phone, which incorporated some of the functions of personal digital assistants, pagers and hand-held game consoles.

“It would be nice to have only one thing to carry than all the other stuff, like a Palm Pilot or a pager,” she said.

Julie said she’d also like a timer on her phone that would remind her of planned events, such as getting up on a Saturday to go to basketball practice.

Katy said she wouldn’t mind having a lot of extras on her phone. But she didn’t think she would use them.

“I think they’re putting too much on phones,” Bonnie said, agreeing. “You can’t do Internet very well on a phone. I guess you can play games, but that’s just a waste of the battery. You can’t do anything on a phone as well as you can on a computer, except for one thing — talk.”