Sure, working at the main Apple campus in Cupertino means my exposure to things of this nature is greatly increased, but even outside of the company walls, I've been seeing more and more people walking about while using their iPhones and cellphones then ever before. There's certainly been great leaps and bounds over the last year or two in what our phones/PDAs are capable of doing, but with the iPhone, either the incidents or just my awareness of people on foot, in motion, with their heads bent down and focused on the device in their hand and not their paths, has dramatically increased.
I don't expect it'll be long before there are some statistics coming out of the insurance industry, much as there have been with cell phone usage in cars and the correlation to accidents, where we'll find pedestrian traffic is experiencing an increase in insurance claims. I mean, I've seen people come millimeters from blind-siding each other almost every day because they're not watching where they're going, they're watching the screen on their iPhone. And I've even seen somebody, and I kid you not, approaching and crossing the street without paying full attention because they're not looking up as they do so.
I give it another 6 months before Apple's the subject of some lame-ass class action lawsuit over selling a device that causes an increase in pedestrian accidents because people don't seem to have the good sense to know better than to look up and around for traffic when they're stepping off the curb.