Phones: Life's 'remote controls'?

That’s what a CBS executive told the New York Times cellphones are becoming to us (or maybe our kids): a kind of “digital remote control." “In Japan, McDonald’s customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets.” Pretty soon, using the Web won’t be something you head to the office or find a wi-fi hotspot to do, it’ll simply happen on a whim, or whenever anybody needs a little more info, a reservation, an address, or a map. “Links” won’t just be on Web pages. A researcher at Hewlett-Packard in the UK calls them “physical hyperlinks” – bits of information that everything in the real world is associated with. Phones will be the way to connect objects with their info – like the nutritional info for a bottle of juice that will no longer have to be on the packaging. We’ll also no longer need to go to an ATM for money; our phones will be our teller machines.