Text messaging - do u luv it or just h8 it?

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

When a bleep announces that my mobile phone has just received a text message I must admit I have mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it's fun to decode a friend's cryptic textspeak: "Woke up @12: Sorry to miss u," or "OK Deschlers 6 pm, cu l8r."

But when I read the phrase "text me back" or "pls txt me," I groan.

The reason is that while I can dash off an e-mail in seconds, composing even the briefest text reply on my cellphone takes ages.

In my case I lay much of the blame on the T9 system, which attempts to predict the word you are trying to
type. It's used on several makes of phone and it's supposed to save time, but I find it does anything but.

For example, let's say I want to type the word "hate." When I press the GHI key to get the "h," T9 yields an "I" instead. If I keep on pressing the same key, T9 suggests hi, gig, high, before finally offering higgi.

Higgi? Don't u just h8 T9? But whether you love them or
hate them, short messaging service (SMS) text messages are here to stay.

Mobile-to-mobile text first took off a couple of years ago in Japan, when teenagers living with their parents in cramped apartments discovered it was the only way they could communicate in private.

Since then text messaging has grown hand in hand with the proliferation of cellphones all over the world - it's proving especially popular with the young and budget-conscious users of prepaid phones.

Globally an estimated 15 billion SMS messages were sent last month, a figure that is expected to rise to 100
billion by December 2002.

In New Zealand as many as a million text messages are sent daily, with most of the traffic going through Vodafone's digital GSM network.

Telecom will capture more when it introduces its third-generation (3G) mobile network this year.

The growth of text messaging has taken the mobile phone companies by surprise, but they are quickly stepping in to exploit what could potentially be a very lucrative market in traffic between mobile phones and the internet.

Telecom's AirNote and Pulsate web portals and Vodafone's Vizzavi site both offer web-to-mobile and mobile-to-e-mail services from 20c a message.

Vizzavi allows you to send up to five free text messages to a mobile a day but, disappointingly, this is restricted to local numbers on the Vodafone network only.

But free text messages to international 021 numbers are available at the MTN gateway (at mtnsms.com) or through the latest version 2000b of the popular chat program ICQ.

Once you have registered at MTN, for example, you may send up to 10 messages to any numbers you like.

Networks such as Vodafone seem to be happy accepting free calls from MTN and ICQ for the time being, because they make money on the return calls, but how long this state of affairs will continue is less certain.

Other overseas sites are experimenting with a wide variety of payment models - the Swedish site Hooya, for example, offers free international text messaging in return for clicking on advertising banners.

One of the most imaginative text messaging sites is San Francisco-based Quios, which is busily building up PlanetQuios, a worldwide network of text message reporters who cover anything from the latest medical breakthroughs to cricket scores.

Reporters are rewarded according to how many people subscribe to their reports with "Q-Points," which at the moment can be used only to pay for yet more text messages.

But it's easy to see that if text messaging continues to grow, similar schemes may one day pay in hard cash.

After all, 100 billion times 20c is a heck of a lot of money.

Links:

Vodafone

Telecom New Zealand

Vizzavi

Pulsate

Air Note

mtnsms.com

ICQ 2000

Hooya

Quios