What is it with mobile phones in movies?

Both posters are correct. It stems from a screenwriter's current problem and why I'm sure period films will be proliferating: dramatically the recent advances in technology wreak havoc with good old human interaction, conversation and even confrontation This was perhaps most pointedly shown on the TV series "24" and its artificial "real-time" premise, which one season had the self-mockery to be sponsored by Sprint (if memory serves), and plenty of product plug close-ups of the phone's screen.

On that show all the action was carried by phone. In a real movie, ideally scenes are enacted, not phoned in, just as the strength of the once-dominant Western genre was in those sweeping, panoramic vistas, the intrinsic thrill and movement of horses and even the inevitable cliched scenes (such as The Gunfight, lampooned and expanded eventually by a stylist like Sergio Leone) were visual and not just some little screen. Lately the use of texting displayed on a big screen from a small screen in the frame is just another dimension of the problem.

Evidence of how self-defeating new technology is to drama & involvement in a movie is watching a movie from 10 or 15 years ago - every time an outdated huge mobile phone with antenna or flip phone shows up, the viewer is distracted from the action to dwell on how "old-fashioned" the object is. The 19th Century doesn't seem old-fashioned in that negative sense but glamorous and exciting.

I guess I would round up Harrison Ford and bring Kelly McGillis out of retirement and get "Witness 2" in production pronto - no problem with distracting technology in that setting. And having just seen a grown-up Lukas Haas in "The Revenant" let's get him back on board, too.