If you know anyone who's feeling a little lonely, but dating sites like eHarmony sound like too much work, this smartphone app may be the perfect gift. The app, called Honey, It's Me, lets a user get video calls from a beautiful virtual girlfriend.

The app's developers, South Korea-based Nabix, hired a 22-year old South Korean female model named Mina to record more than 100 messages. Those messages span the day, from "Are you still sleeping?" to "Time for breakfast!" to "Good night, sweet dreams." If you download the Honey, It's Me app, you can expect to get three or four calls from Mina every day. Currently, the messages are in Korean, so if you don't speak the language, you're out of lady luck.

This may be the strangest smart phone since the one that let you track the destination of toilet-flushed waste.

Launched on Nov. 30, the iPhone application was getting more than 80,000 downloads each day at its peak during the initial free launch period. The number of downloads has settled down quite a bit since the free version was replaced with a $1.99 one available in Apple's iTunes store.

"I've developed this application to console people for their loneliness," Kim Yoon-Kak, head of Nabix, told AFP.

I know plenty of people who live alone, and they have their own strategies for dealing with the occasional loneliness. But that usually involves turning on the television or going to a local coffee shop, not downloading a smart phone app to pose as a virtual girlfriend.

Nabix is working on versions of the Honey, It's Me smart phone app with more messages in English, Chinese and Japanese. The company plans to release free and premium version of the app in the iTunes store. It's also working on an Android version, and you know how excited I get when I hear about more apps in the Android market.

But what do you think of the "Honey, It's Me" app? Is it a good way to cure the wintertime lonely blues, or does it make us too dependent on technology in a very strange way?