SMS Speed Record Sets Guinness World Record

"A 23-year-old Singaporean woman appears to have set a world record for sending text messages over a cellphone, underlining Asia's growing obsession with cellplhone technology.

Kimberly Yeo thumbed 26 words in 43.24 seconds into her phone, beating a world record of 67 seconds for the same words set by a Briton in September 2003, said Singapore's dominant telephone carrier, Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), on Monday.

Cellphones are an ubiquitous accessory in technology-savvy Singapore where more than four out of five people own a handset, giving the wealthy city-state one of the world's highest cellphone penetration rates.

At a contest in front of a department store on Sunday, Yeo was among 125 people timed by SingTel and a panel of independent officials to see how fast they could type the following 160-character message: 'The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.'...

Yeo, who won a S$17 500 (about R64 000) in cash for her nimble thumbs, said she sends out about an average of 1 500 text messages a month to friends and family." [iol, via textually.org]

Mobile Users Top 1.5 Billion

"As of the first week of June 2004, the mobile service industry broke the 1.5 billion subscriber mark worldwide. Research firm EMC also predicts that the industry will pass the 2 billion mark as early as 2006, far earlier than some other predictions, and reach 2.45 billion by the end of 2009." [infoSync World]

Guess where a lot of that growth is going to come from?

Generation Text

"New research from Mobile Youth - a mobile telecoms consultancy - found that 700,000 (20%) of primary school children own mobile phones and that the under 10s "represent the fastest-growing segment of mobile phone ownership within Britain".

'They are the key fashion accessory which no self respecting child can do without,' says the report. It predicts that by 2006, more than one million primary school kids (a third of all five-to-nine year olds) will own mobiles." [The Guardian]

Me, My Mobile and I 

"A new generation of mobile users are becoming so emotionally attached to their phones that they cannot live without them.

This is one of the key findings of a study into how people use their mobile phones entitled Me, My Mobile and I.

The annual study from research firm Teleconomy reveals that 10 to 14-year-olds - dubbed M-Agers - are rapidly becoming the most sophisticated users of phones.

Even toddlers are able to tell the difference between incoming phone calls and text messages said Professor Michael Hulme, chairman of Teleconomy....

'They are growing up ready to take on these services,' said Prof Hulme....

Phones are rapidly replacing address books, diaries, watches and alarm clocks as people turn increasingly to their handsets to help manage their lives." [BBC News, via textually.org]

An admittedly small study group, but the findings are well supported elsewhere. The two killer statistics, though - and the ones to which libraries need to pay particular attention - are that "32% see phone as tool rather than intimate object" and "85% of children had personalised phones."

It's not like these things are going away, you know.