Toby Shapshak: Last week I watched two packed press conferences with great interest. The first, which I saw via online video and live updates, was the Steve Jobs show.

The Apple CEO wowed the audience and the world again with new iPods. The new Nano is all touchscreen, while the Touch is all iPhone 4 - minus the phone.

But over in Midrand, an arguably more important announcement was being made. It might not sell more iPhones, but it will enable millions more people to be financially independent.

M-Pesa is one of the cleverest things to happen to cellphones and its similarity to the rise of cheques should be enough of a historical echo for people to see its value.

It works like this: you register using a Vodacom phone at a Nedbank branch, using your phone number as your account number. It requires a pin number like an ATM to keep it secure.

Then you send a voucher to any other cellphone number that lets them claim that back as cash (or use it for airtime or transfer to someone else) within seven days from a registered outlet. These are retail stores (including Pick 'n Pay, Makro, PEP, Edgars, CNA, Jet, GloCell and Autopage), spaza shops and Nedbank branches.

"We are planning nothing short of a mobile money revolution with M-Pesa," says Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys, who urged people to tweet about the event using the #mpesa hashtag. This Twitter-awareness must be a first for the CEO of a JSE-listed company. "This is a mobile money revolution that will stimulate the economy," he said.

It's hard not to agree with him, given what this easy-to-use system has done for Kenya, where it was developed by Vodafone subsidiary Safaricom and now has 10million users. Vodacom says it's also aiming to reach the same number of people in South Africa.

"This is not hyperbole," says Kenyan Ory Okolloh, who herself was involved in a little start-up called Ushahidi that has gone global.

It's arguably the most frictionless means of payment humanity has yet seen, a kind of PayPal for cellphones. PayPal, the brainchild of former Pretoria schoolboy Elon Musk, is the next-gen payment mechanism that once kickstarted a little online commerce venture called eBay. I suspect something similar will happen with M-Pesa.

I know. Not many people would be foolish enough, as I have been, to compare an Apple event in San Francisco to one in Midrand. But it's not difficult to see the extraordinary potential of this cellular-based payment system, given how the vast majority of Africans will experience the internet, and all its wonders of connectivity through a mobile phone.

It is already used as the primary mode of communication. People always have their phones on them; and now they can use M-Pesa in any circumstance, far away from banking infrastructure and can give each other a virtual, SMS "cheque" - the paper-based equivalent of which is being phased out, made redundant by the electronic fund transfers (EFTs) of internet banking. Right now M-Pesa can only be used by Vodacom customers, but they can send money to any other network's users too. It currently only does money transfers - the remittance industry for migrant workers sending money home alone is in the hundreds of millions of dollars - but Uys says other payment forms and salary deposits, that are now also possible in Kenya and Tanzania, will follow.

Sure, the future of portable devices, as evidenced by the new range of iPods launched by Jobs last week, is touchscreens. By 2015 over half of the computers that will be used by under 15-year-olds will have touchscreens, say IT researchers Gartner. Anyone who has used an iPhone, iPad or Android handset knows that the ease of literally having computing power at your fingertips provides the ideal interface for portable devices.

But right now there's a revolution going on with good old SMS. As my grandfather liked to say: Bravo.

• Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine