Men rely on flash phones to pick up girls

Forget the cheesy chat-up lines, flash car or dodgy dancing, men are now whipping out their mobiles to attract the ladies, research from Sheffield Hallam University reveals.

The research also found men actively display their phones more than women in social situations to look important and popular and also to show off to male peers.

Dr Simeon Yates, director of the Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute at Sheffield Hallam who headed up the research told CNET.co.uk's sister site, silicon.com, the situation is "much more complicated and more to do with how we use the phones".

Yates said men might fiddle with mobiles because they don't have handbags or anywhere else to store them, and the phones can also act as a point of conversation with one's peers. "But they could just be showing off," he added.

According to Yates, both men and women will try to 'maintain face' in same sex groups by checking caller IDs -- with women double checking an intimate call isn't incoming and blokes worried it could be their mums on the other end of the line.

The two-year study observed men and women in various public locations including restaurants, bars and coffee shops.

Yates has also completed research on how the different sexes text each other, finding that women write texts to other women that are twice as long as male-to-male text correspondence.