Top Mobile 4 U

Figures have been released from the Mobile Data Association (MDA) that shows a large growth of mobile phone usage in the UK.

Text messages continue to get even more popular despite the fact that email access through the internet is available on most mobile phone models. A total of 57 billion text messages were sent last year alone that is a 40% increase from the previous year. In December 5,000 of these texts were sent every second and on New Years Eve a huge 290 million texts were sent alone, this is a growth of 55%. There are many possible reasons for this large rise in messages being sent, one is that more network operators are offering more free texts or unlimited amounts of text messages with their tariffs.

But it is not just text message traffic that has increased, picture messages have also risen. Camera phones are becoming increasingly popular and it is extremely rare for new mobile phones to not have a camera. Also phone’s camera abilities and features keep on getting better and some have true digital camera qualities such as the Samsung Soul and Nokia N95 that have amazing 5 mega pixels cameras and digital zooms. Because of this more and more people will be taking high quality picture messages and sending them on to others. Sending pictures has also become very simple as picture messages can be sent to mobiles across all networks, where as a few years ago this was not possible. Last year over 448 million picture messages were sent in the UK.

Mobile broadband has also been getting easier to access through internet enabled mobile phones and the costs to access the internet are becoming cheaper with flat-rate 3G broadband packages. Because of these changes accessing the internet through a mobile has been getting increasingly popular and in December 2007 over 17 million people accessed the internet via their mobile phone.

With the expected explosion in laptop sales this year (many of which will be paired with either a mobile phone or USB modem) this growth is set to continue unabated for the forseeable future as we all become even more accustomed to having access to our friends and data regardless of whether we’re at home, the office or out and about. The vision of a wireless world is much close than you might think.