Does cold weather kill cell phones?

Baby, it's cold outside! While you can wrap yourself up in a Snuggie to keep warm, your cell phone can't. (Inventors, take note.)

But electronics and cold weather don't mix well, and by popular consensus, extremely cold temperatures can be worse for your gadgets than extreme heat.

But is the old legend true? Will losing your phone for an hour in the snow render it inoperable?

Popular Mechanics actually put the old adage to the test, exposing a series of cell phones to increasingly colder temperatures to find out exactly what effects cold weather had on cell phones, and at what temperature problems start to arise.

In general, the results looked like this:

> At 10 degrees Fahrenheit, cell phone screens start to dim.

> At -10 degrees, some phones start to experience "battery problems."

> At -20 degrees, some model phones begin to shut down.

> By -30 degrees, screens start to go haywire and batteries start to develop serious issues.

> The lowest temperature at which any phone continued to operate at all was -55 degrees Fahrenheit.

As for permanent damage, there really wasn't any. Once phones are returned to regular temperatures, they all seem to work fine once again -- and even plugging a still-frozen phone into wall power will often bring it back to life.

Read the full story for some interesting factoids, including the tale of dipping a Motorola KRZR -- the magazine's toughest phone -- into liquid nitrogen. (It still worked to some extent, and recovered just fine after thawing out.)