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At the airport car park, instead of queuing to pay for a ticket I simply held up my invoice to a QR scanner at the gate which instantly allowed me in (though admittedly I still had to remember not to lose the tiny plastic token that would let me out again). Once inside I didn't need paper tickets or boarding passes, as the PDF files on my mobile phone were again all that was required to get me through the various automated gates.

My phone was also a handy replacement for the trusty tourist guides and phrasebook; a handy app gave me written and spoken examples of all the useful phrases I might need, and of course web access (every restaurant offers free wi-fi along with its ouzo and grappa) meant I was never more than a few clicks away from a map, a review or a bus timetable - or those all-important Premier League results!

A slight glitch at the Greek island airport on the return home had me wishing they'd invested in some of those nifty Fujitsu A6 scanners, as each traveller's passport details were painstakingly keyed by hand into a green screen - but give it another few years and I'm sure they'll catch up! On landing in the UK of course, I took the option of using my chipped passport to avoid the queues at passport control - again, a neat combination of document scanning and other recognition tech that will, on wider adoption, hugely streamline one of the most tedious parts of any journey.

And on my return to my car and realising that my tax disc was about to expire, I remembered that even that trusty system was about to be put out to grass, replaced by a combination of huge interoperating databases and automated number-plate recognition (ANR) technology. Slowly but surely, in all sorts of subtle ways, the technology we cover in these pages is seeping across into the things we all do every day.

Dave Tyler
Editor
david.tyler@btc.co.uk