The pokegear? Yes. It's a bit like a smartphone back home--those are mobile telephones that also serve as small handheld computers and they're expensive, higher-status items... although getting more ubiquitous as time goes by.

And if your friend has any engineering skills, they're a little more useful here. Which, again, is something I do know from my boyfriend.

[Legit, legit. Steven's dad is a computer programmer and a good one, so Steven knows a little more than the average layman, although the extent of his own coding ability is strictly HTML/CSS/PHP: mark-up language, rather than actual programing.]