The madman whose vision let me buy this paper in Helsinki... or write this column on my mobile phone

LAST Tuesday week, I woke up, had a shower, and sat down to a breakfast of two poached eggs, brown toast and a mug of coffee. As I ate, I read the Irish Daily Mail from cover to cover, flicking through the pages and, when I got to the TV listings, I set my Sky box to record some programmes that evening. Then I paid a few bills, checked the weather forecast, and turned on Morning Ireland to catch the headlines.

Not an unusual start to the day, you might think, except for one thing. I was in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, and I did it all on my phone.

What was inconceivable a decade ago now is commonplace, and the reason why is simple: yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the introduction of the iPhone, the device that changed our lives forever. When it was released, the iPhone was much more limited than it is today. It ran only on Edge, an enhanced but still very slow version of the old GPRS data delivery system, once described as ‘like asking your elderly neighbour to deliver the mail for you’.

When 3G and 4G came along, with blistering download and upload speeds unthinkable just a few years previously, Apple debuted apps (short for applications) and suddenly the entire repository of human knowledge, every thought ever expressed, every quote ever uttered, was in our pockets, and accessible with the flick of a finger.

Genius

But if that was revolutionary, the real capability of the phone is only just being unleashed. With Apple Pay, you no longer have to carry a wallet at all if all you plan on making are smaller purchases. Just like contactless credit cards, you now can pay for your lunchtime sandwich, or your train ticket, simply by holding your phone close to the credit card reader and using your thumbprint as proof that the debit is coming from your linked bank account. As things stand, only some banks here offer Apple Pay and its Android Pay equivalent to their customers, but the rest will catch up. So will supermarkets and other shops with loyalty card schemes, and soon, those 20 plastic cards you carry around – your Leap commuter card, AA membership, coffee shop reward card, very likely even your social welfare and medical cards – will be physically redundant. Every transaction you make will be by phone alone.

This will not be revolutionary for users, because we have exponentially and with can’t out fuss or, in most cases, even tuition, become adept at utilising every innovation that comes our way, thanks to Apple’s genius for making its products almost completely intuitive.

I have apps for everything on my phone. I can watch UK channels all over Europe, or catch up on Sky Go with programmes I’ve downloaded. I can drop a pin on Google maps to remind me where I parked the car when I’m in a strange city. I can search restaurants by ethnic cuisine, or recipes for when I’m cooking at home. I buy books on Amazon Kindle, check in for flights and get the boarding pass delivered to my Apple Wallet. I take photos, set my alarm to wake me, stream music on Spotify, hunt down Pokémon all over the world, and even, on occasion, open the Pages or Microsoft Word apps and actually write stories for this newspaper using a Bluetooth keyboard for convenience, given that tapping 1,000 words out would take forever.

Unimpressed

Sometimes, when I can’t be bothered even flicking, I just hold down the navigation button and ask Siri, the built-in personal assistant, to tell me where the nearest garage is when I need petrol, or to dial phone numbers for me. If you’re with friends and you want to show them a photo of your kids you took a few Christmases ago, but can’t be bothered scrolling through thousands of others to find them, all you have to do is ask Siri to show you all photos from December 2014, and up they pop. It borders on magic, and yet it nearly didn’t happen at all.

When Apple’s chief designer Jony Ive and others in the company first showed founder Steve Jobs multi-touch technology, he was completely unimpressed. Touchscreen has been around for decades and came to prominence with Palm Pilots and other personal organisers, but you needed a stylus to use them, and I tell you how many of those I lost. Multi-touch was completely different. Using only your fingers, you could tap the screen to open programmes, swipe sideways to open new pages, use a finger and thumb in an expansive gesture to zoom in on pages and, ultimately, even use your fingerprint to open a device locked to everyone but you.

It was as revolutionary as the mouse, the device that made home computing possible, with one key difference – you now actually were the mouse. What it also allowed for was a phone with no buttons taking up the available space; anyone who ever had a BlackBerry will remember how fiddly the keyboard was and also how annoying, with the keys laid out in rows from A to Z, rather than in the Qwerty format familiar from typewriters. The day I was out of contract on my BlackBerry, I put it on the floor and jumped up and down on it until it was in a million pieces. I hated it.

Evolution

Multi-touch screens were so much better, with simple shortcuts to switch between lower and uppercase, or letters and numbers. Arranging apps so the most frequently used were on the home page couldn’t have been simpler. It was liberating. Even Jobs, once a sceptic, embraced it with a passion, though not for everything. Remember when you had to go through tiered menus on your old Nokia to put it on Silent mode for a meeting or just so you could enjoy a movie without annoying everyone else in the cinema? Steve Jobs, seemingly counterintuitively for someone dedicated to new technology, just added an old-fashioned switch at the side of the phone.

Of course, not every evolution of the iPhone is welcome. I’m keeping my 6 Plus (it’s my fifth iPhone, incidentally) because the 7 has no headphone jack, and I’d lose Bluetooth headphones in five minutes. Sometimes, the folks in Cupertino can be too clever for their own good.

But what we’re seeing now will, I suspect, only become clear to us when we look back again, ten years hence. Credit cards started the process, but Apple Pay will complete it. We are heading to a fully cashless society, where the concept of carrying a pocketful of coins and a wallet filled with notes soon will seem as ridiculous as the notion that a phone only could be used to make phone calls.

Next time I’m having my breakfast in a café in Helsinki, reading my Irish Daily Mail, I won’t be fishing around for a few euro to pay for the poached eggs, toast and coffee. I’ll just let my iPhone do all that nonsense for me.