The Providence police say this model is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, targets of muggers.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

PROVIDENCE — Ysatis V. Martinez and her friend were just outside Providence Place mall, on the Riverwalk below. Several youths came up to them, apparently trying to make time.

Her friend gave one of the youths her phone number. And then he asked to enter his number into her trendy Sidekick LX cell phone. So she handed it over.

But then things turned ugly. The youth ran off with the phone and Martinez’s friend turned to her with a pleading voice. She pulled out her purple Sidekick Slide to call for help.

“I’m crunching it to my ear,” Martinez said, recalling that frightening day last winter. “I’m, like, ‘I’m gonna call someone. I’m gonna call someone’.

“And this kid takes out a knife, and he’s, like, ‘Give me your phone.’ And I was, like, are you serious?” The second youth repeated his demand. When the brief incident was over, both of the young women had been thrown to the sidewalk and their phones stolen.

Martinez, 18, of Warwick, a self-described cell-phone addict, now counts herself a casualty of the urban cell-phone culture. More than one-third of the robberies in Providence this year are cell-phone robberies, and Police Chief Dean M. Esserman said “a good number” of the robberies last year were the same.

The phones are being taken at gunpoint and knifepoint, and some victims have suffered a beating before giving up their prized possession.

“It really has become a problem,” said Detective Capt. Hugh T. Clements Jr., acting commander of the police Investigative Division. “This has taken the place of the gold neck chain” as a preferred target of robbers.

Some of the robberies, police reports show, have been especially brazen: at an elevator inside Providence Place, on the mall skybridge, and in public schools. A robbery, as distinguished from a larceny, involves the use or threatened use of force.

After the Riverwalk mugging, Martinez bought a purple Sidekick Slide for $500. But one of a group of youths stole it from her car on a city street in August.

“That killed me,” said the 2008 graduate of Warwick’s Pilgrim High School who works at Wendy’s to earn money to have a cell phone. “Oh, I was shattered when that one was lost. Like, I was just, I couldn’t believe it. Wow. I came home crying and everything, cussin’ up. I couldn’t believe that. …”

A SLEEK SMARTPHONE, as the latest generation of multiple-use cell phones is known, is precious to status-conscious urban teenagers.

“It’s cool. It’s the thing to have,” said Detective Lt. Robert Lepre, robbery squad commander.

The Sidekick, with a nifty slide-out mini-keyboard for carrying on virtually continuous conversations via instant-message texting, is especially coveted, according to teens and the police. Each of the two conversationalists can see a picture of her chat partner on her view screen.

A band around the LX model glows blue to signal an incoming message.

“This is why they steal the phone, because it lights up,” Martinez said. “It’s amusing to people …”

Richard Reed, 16, of Providence, an 11th-grade student at Alvarez High School, has a Sidekick ID.

Admiring its array of features, he pointed out, “It’s basically like a miniature computer.”

He had an earlier-model Sidekick ID swiped at school that was recovered when the thief was confronted. But he lost that phone for good when he and a friend were mugged by three other youths after they got off a bus in the Hartford neighborhood on their way home from school last spring.

“It’s like a luxury,” he said of the premium phone. “But it gets me angry that somebody would be jerk enough to do something like that.”

“One of my friends, he was walking home. They put a gun to his head for a Sidekick 3. Then another kid that I know, his friend got a gun put to his head for a Sidekick,” he said.

Large and midsize cities across the nation, including Boston, have been struck by the phenomenon. It is the most common robbery in Los Angeles, the police report.

The cell-phone robberies are pushing up the Providence crime rate, Clements acknowledged last week. In 2007, there were 392 robberies of all kinds. For 2008, through Oct. 26, there are already 424 robberies.

Of those 424 robberies, cell phones were taken in 158 cases, or about 37 percent.

Although some cell phones were taken incidentally in a robbery or to prevent a victim from calling 911, the police say a cell phone was the target in a large majority of the cases. And, they acknowledge, not all robberies are reported.

A case in point is that of Nathalie Cedeno, 15, of Providence, a ninth grader at Central High School, who was robbed of her Blackjack as she was walking down a street in Elmwood distractedly talking to her boyfriend. Another youth pounced and tore the phone from her grasp.

Standing on the sidewalk on Hamilton Street where she was attacked, Nathalie described what happened on that day last winter.

“I thought it was one of my friends playing around with me” at first. “When I looked back, I hit him with my purse. But I had my nails done [that day], so I couldn’t, really, like, fight with him and stuff … I was scared. I was really scared.”

She replaced it with a Sidekick LX, but that, too, was taken from her in another mugging on an Elmwood street about five months later.

“…When my second phone got stolen, I didn’t even bother calling the police, for the fact that the first time it got stolen, they couldn’t find the person. So, I thought, why bother…,” she said.

Most of the robbers and victims, according to the police, range in age from 14 to early 20s. Many of the crimes occur between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, when teens have left school and are around and about.

Premium phones costing hundreds of dollars are being taken, especially those with SIM-card technology. Some phones such as products offered by the service provider T-Mobile USA feature a portable memory chip called a SIM card, while others have an integrated memory. The SIM card contains the cell phone number, phone book, texts and other data.

If a phone with integrated memory is stolen, the police say, it is useless as soon as it is deactivated by the service provider. If it has a SIM card, a robber or a fence merely removes the victim’s SIM card and inserts a new one from his own service provider.

“You put a new one in and you’ve got a $300 phone,” Lepre said. “And it’s up and running.”

Given that the crimes are scattered around the city and unpredictable, the police say the best they can do is aggressively investigate. And they claim a clearance rate of 34 percent, compared with the national clearance rate of 25 to 26 percent for robbery by departments in similar-size cities.

It is not unusual for a victim to call a robber on the stolen cell phone in an effort to negotiate its return, or for the police to make contact in an effort to trap the criminal. In a case last May in which a cell phone was taken at gunpoint in Silver Lake, for example, the victim called his own phone and a man who answered promised to return it. The police went to the meeting place, and two men were charged with possession of stolen goods.

The robbers keep the phones for themselves or sell them — often for about $100 — on the street, to a storekeeper who will buy on the black market, or even on Craigslist, according to the police.

One victim, Shina M. Garcia, 18, of Providence, spotted her stolen Sidekick for sale in a local beeper store last summer — the day after she was mugged for it. The store gave it back.

“They watch out for people who have Sidekicks,” Ysatis Martinez said of the robbers and thieves. “… They watch for when you put it down. For when you just, you have it in your hand lightly. Because they’ll snatch it and run.”

Martinez had a big bill to pay — about $500 — after the Riverwalk mugging. She did not get through right away to T-Mobile, her service provider, to report the loss. In the 13 hours the robber had her phone before she gave notice, he ran up the bill by downloading wallpaper and ringtones — each time for a fee — and making interstate calls and calls to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. T-Mobile wouldn’t waive the charges.

She now stays up late at night on her fourth cell phone, a Sidekick LX, which she keeps taped to a living room end table when it’s not in use so that when friends come over to her house, their light-fingered companions don’t lift it.

She chuckled, slightly self-conscious. “It’s addictive,” she said. “I love my Sidekick.”

Nathalie Cedeno agrees.

“I think I can’t live without my phone. It’s my life.”

gsmith@projo.com