Wendyl Nissen: iParis at the touch of a screen

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The iPhone effect is causing great concern for the police in Paris. Gone are the days when you were at risk of having your wallet pickpocketed on the Metro.

Today, thieves are after iPhones and the Paris police are having to get off their Rollerblades for more than two minutes and deal with something worse than a fashion crime.

"I heard it on National Radio," I told my husband with authority. "Police advise that you should never bring your iPhone out on the Metro or you are simply advertising to the would-be thieves that you have one up for grabs."

"Really," he said, consulting his iPhone.

I had grudgingly agreed to his new best friend joining us on our overseas holiday as I had justifiable misgivings about never getting any time alone with my husband.

Since the iPhone arrived in our home it has rarely been out of his left hand and has taken over many of the jobs I used to enjoy, such things as chatting about our day and discussing Egypt and Libya.

The reason iPhone hitched a ride to Paris was the Metro app. It was going to make it much easier to find our way around the city simply by tapping in our destination and receiving instructions as to which line and direction we needed.

For weeks before we left we would be woken in the middle of the night by a message telling us that line four was down past Chatelet, and would not resume for two hours, and that line one was now restored to normal service at Hotel de Ville.

"So, anyway," I continued as we were attempting to buy our Metro tickets. "Don't bring it out on the train or you'll be asking for trouble. The last thing we want at the start of our holiday is for you to lose your best friend."

I was once the victim of a pickpocket attempt in Rome and the experience will forever be imprinted on my memory and that of my daughter, who was with me at the time.

I tore so many strips off the woman who had attempted to put her hand in my pocket that she had not a shred of dignity left by the time I let her get off the bus. I'm fairly sure the Italians heading to Mass on that Sunday morning had learned a few new words of English.

Rather than feel sorry for me my daughter ran after the poor woman and gave her five euros. I was not about to let it happen again.

My husband put the iPhone in his pocket and we got on the train, sat down and began to soak up the Parisian ambience.

"Ahem," was all he said.

As I looked around the carriage every single person was busily tapping away on their iPhones. It was an iPhone convention with not a single pickpocket in sight.

It turns out that after the United States, the French are the biggest users of iPhones in the world and more than two million of them have been sold in Paris alone.

"What was that about the iPhone effect?" asked my husband as he retrieved his best friend and they reunited with a great deal of tapping and information-gathering.

I left him and the rest of the carriage to their iLives and gazed out the window, excited to be back in Paris. I saw a homeless man tucked up for the night in a Metro station with a bottle of Beaujolais, a warm sleeping bag and the latest copy of Vogue.

I saw a couple ballroom dance while they waited for their train and an older woman cradling her tiny bag of delicate macaroon biscuits, pieces of nonsense I was to eat two days later and decide that they tasted just like heaven.

Five days later I complained that Paris just wasn't what it used to be. Thanks to the iPhone we hadn't once caught the wrong train and ended up at midnight in a part of the city we'd never seen before. Nor had we missed our children, chatting to them regularly on Skype via the iPhone.

"Travelling to the other side of the world used to be so isolating and challenging," I was going to say - but I was too busy munching macaroons and sipping a tea named after Marie Antoinette at a tearoom the iPhone had discovered for me to care.