Pokemon Go: US driver caught playing game on eight separate phones
An officer, expecting to help a broken down vehicle, instead finds eight handsets in a blue foam square on the passenger seat.
Friday 16 August 2019 18:12, UK
A driver has escaped punishment after being found playing Pokemon Go on eight phones at the same time while behind the wheel.
The man was spotted by a US state trooper on the hard shoulder of Highway 518 in Burien, south of Seattle near the city's international airport.
Thinking the vehicle had broken down, Sergeant Kyle Smith of the Washington State Patrol, pulled over to help.
To his astonishment, he found that, rather than suffering a mechanical issue, the unnamed driver was playing Pokemon Go on eight mobile phones at the same time.
A picture posted to social media by patrol spokesman Trooper Rick Johnson showed the man had cut phone shapes out of a square of blue foam placed on the passenger seat for easy access to the devices.
"This is what was next to the driver!," he said in a tweet.
"Playing #PokemonGO with EIGHT (8) phones!"
Amazingly, Mr Johnson said Sergeant Smith did not give the man a ticket because he did not see the man using the phones while the car was moving.
But the officer asked the driver to put the phones on the back seat and move along, because stopping on the shoulder is for emergencies only.
Pokemon Go is a mobile phone game that uses augmented reality to allow players to capture their favourite Pokemon in the real world using the same technology Google Maps uses.
Launched in 2016, it rapidly became wildly popular, raising concerns that, in their desire to capture their favourite Pokemon characters, players could put themselves in danger.
One report blamed two deaths in the US on the game in the first six months after release and, it said, costs of $7.3bn (£5.4bn).