Ted Landphair of voanews.com writes:

A lot of people gave up carrying much cash a long time ago, since they knew ‘plastic’ - a credit or debit card, or a store or public transit ‘smart card’ - would be accepted just about everywhere.

But to hear tech companies tell it, plastic cards will be museum pieces as well before long.

We start this week's edition of The Fonecast with a new product from RIM: the mobile-enabled BlackBerry PlayBook. Next comes Vodafone's move to Tech City and Google moving its mobile wallet into the cloud.

You'll also find the latest batch of quarterly results, some mobile data research and a story about sheep sending SMS text messages.

There are plenty of quarterly results to report in this week's edition of The Fonecast, including Samsung, Apple, Telefonica and Facebook. In addition, we have new research that shows how smartphone sales are racing ahead as feature phone sales slow down.

There's also news about mobile coverage in the Channel Tunnel, mobile application downloads and m-commerce.

Mark Bridge writes:

Internet veteran Yahoo! provided last week’s biggest news, at least in terms of press coverage. It appointed Marissa Mayer as its President and Chief Executive Officer, having enticed her away from Google after 13 years.

Mark Bridge writes:

It was a good week for technology stories hitting the mainstream news, thanks to the apparent appearance of a Higgs boson, Sir Alan Sugar’s YouView online TV service and football goal-line technology.

Mobile-related news hasn’t been quite so big, although plenty of well-known names have turned up in the headlines. What’s also been turning up – rather more than usual – is the presence of WiFi.