大象传媒

Making the most of your mobile

• By Paul Crichton
• 22 Nov 06, 04:29 PM

I鈥檝e read a couple of articles in the last few days about the future development of mobile phones, and how they could eventually become 鈥溾��.

In short, mobile phones may soon hold personal information on a 鈥渢ag鈥� fitted to your mobile phone, with the ability to transmit data to a suitable reader. This could be bank account information, oyster card information and so on.

You could, for example buy a concert ticket with your phone, and then have it scanned when you get to the venue.

A of similar technology is taking place in Austria, where you can buy soft drinks from vending machines using a mobile phone to pay, rather than hoping you have the right small change.

Whilst this could be great for all of us, anyone who is visually impaired and who uses a cashpoint machine will see some advantages straight away. If you can use your own mobile phone, then you won鈥檛 have to worry that each bank has its own variation of keypad on a cashpoint, nor that the variety and order of transactions presented by each bank once you鈥檝e logged in are different either.

I found this a rather interesting idea, and echoes what Leonie Watson said when we spoke to her a few days ago, that, 鈥渁 lot of access needs may be met by some of the cool, Star Trek style stuff going on, almost by accident.鈥� This is another example of something designed to make life easier for everyone potentially benefiting the visually impaired the most without that necessarily being the objective.

There is still a lot of work to be done on this before it becomes a reality, and perhaps because I鈥檝e watched too many scary documentaries lately about data protection, one area that I will be looking at before adopting this will be security. Nonetheless, its an interesting peek into a more accessible near future.

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