Today marks twenty years since the first ever short message service (SMS) text was sent. The first SMS text message was “Merry Christmas” and was sent via computer by Neil Papwell, a 22 year old engineer, to Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis on his Orbitel 901 mobile phone. Now texting is the “most widely used data application in the world, with 3.6 billion active users, or 78% of all mobile phone subscribers” according to Wikipedia.
Initially text messaging was free and mobile calls were expensive which could explain its enthusiastic adoption by mobile phone users. In 1995 texters were helped out by the arrival of the T9 input system. The Guardian reveals that by 2001 there were one billion texts per month sent by British mobile users. Current figures from Ofcom show that the average UK resident sends 50 text messages a week. The most prolific texters are 12-15 year olds who send an average of 193 SMS messages per week.
Texting is now a large part of most people’s communications, as you can see from the above figures. While there are lots of new ways to message friends, colleagues and family none are so universal. The service is also quick and relatively cheap, many mobile phone contract owners get unlimited free texts, and even PAYG users often get a free amount of texts with their top-ups.
While some people are very fast at texting, even with an old style T9 keypad, smartphones have introduced new on-screen keyboards with different ways of inputting your text. Swype is an innovative input method where you keep your finger on the screen and trace through the letters to spell each word. Then there are great predictive systems such as Swiftkey. More old-meets-new methods to input text include hand writing recognition and speech to text/text to speech functionality. For some people a hardware QWERTY keyboard incorporated into a smartphone is the favoured option.
Do you text more than you talk? Oh, and I nearly forgot, Merry Christmas!
