It's similar to Internet chat. In Europe and Asia, SMS accounts for millions of dollars of revenue for the wireless carriers. Sending an SMS message is billed by the message at about 30 cents a pop. It's estimated that 5,000 SMS messages per second are sent worldwide. However, it has failed to take off in North America because an SMS sender can only transmit a message to someone on the same network.
Carriers say they are working on fixing that problem.
The other drawback is that North Americans haven't taken to typing text messages on a dial pad, even with smart technologies that guess at the word you are typing to speed up input. But the Europeans have mastered the technique. Later, he said parents punish their misbehaving kids by taking their phones away from them for a week. Next generation cell technologies will take that one further and allow the transmission of images, audio and text between phones. Sivula predicted that parents would be able to take pictures of their new baby and transmit the images along with birth stats and perhaps an audio message to grandparents.