Cellphones can provide valuable clues for solving crimes but the technology is complex and the current tools limited, U.S. experts say.

Data stored in a cellphone or other mobile device could be useful to law enforcement, but forensic tools to recover such data at the crime scene are only slowly becoming available, IEEE Spectrum magazine reports.

Most currently available tools are offshoots of consumer products designed to allow phone users to transfer photos, address books, ring tones and other stored information from an old phone to a new one or to a personal computer, the magazine said.

And while dedicated technologies are being developed, each new generation of cellphones brings new services, new features and sometime completely new operating systems.

With developers of forensic tools struggling to keep up, most crime investigators still have to wait for results to come back from specialist labs, the magazine said.