By Jonathan Amos, BBC News Online – “Smokers desperate to give up cigarettes could soon resort to a small program on their mobile phone or PDA. It would throw up a series of flickering dots on the screen, which psychologists say seem to break some of the mental processes that drive the need for another nicotine fix.

The idea has been tested in the lab on a desktop computer in a controlled study on students.

But researcher Dr John May, from Sheffield University, UK, said it was something that could quite possibly find its way on to portable devices in the not too distant future. “