The mobile phone will become your ticket on the train and tram, it will pay for your breakfast muffin and coffee and, according to Visa and MasterCard, it could even take over the functions of your credit card.

You can already buy tickets over the phone, but we will see the phone becoming a payment method itself, according to Vodafone’s Victorian general manager Edward Goff. The phone will hold the credit so the Visas and the MasterCards will be doing deals to make the payment method fully integrated with the phone.

"Anything available on the internet will be available on phones, plus pure content - downloadable music, videos and so on".

Further into the future the computer chip and memory built into the next generation of mobile phones will begin replacing the identity cards that give access to our workplaces and hold our personal information. The mobile phone could even replace the new smart Medicare card the Government has just introduced.

da SMARTmobs