Phone bar code readers

(NTT Docomo's service) Has come up quite a few times recently - first in Bill Moggridge's video clip of someone trying to buy a drink from a vending machine. There are huge problems with everything that happens after the bar code has been read - but not with the bar code use in itself. It has a high penetration among Docomo's customers.
Tomi Ahonen has written up NWA's advertising campaign (users point their phone at huge 2-d bar codes on advertisement hoardings that then take them to a quiz about NWA's travel destinations, presented as senryu poem).
And then I clicked from there to Tomi's rave review having first seen the technology in 2005. Quote "Typing is so last year."