While there has been quite the kerfuffle about banning texting while driving and educating Australian youngsters on text speak, a new survey shows that the vast majority of us haven't even sent a single SMS. Research firm Ipsos MediaCT polled individuals in a variety of countries and came to one general conclusion: If folks are using SMS, "they're using it frequently." On the flip-side, those who aren't savvy with text messaging aren't apt to just dabble in it. For instance, 82% of respondents in America said "that they never used text messaging, while 3% said that they used it monthly or less" and 15% reported using it "every week or even more. Who knows what that figure would be if carriers stopping charging an arm and a leg for per-use messaging.

[Via Textually, image courtesy of ugo]

Just a little over a year after going to 15 cents per message, T-Mobile's at it again, bumping the rate to 20 cents for those who go over their monthly allotment. For anyone with an unlimited messaging plan, it's obviously not an issue -- but many folks aren't, so this could end up stinging the pocketbook just a bit when it goes in effect come August 29. For what it's worth, T-Mob just seems to be responding to the 20 cent trend that's going on in the industry right now -- but it still hurts something fierce, and it's a pretty solid reminder that even casual texters are better off on a legit messaging plan these days.

[Thanks, Ryan J. and Mike]

This ain't your grandpappy's My Circle. Well, actually, it pretty much is, with one small change: customers signing up for a My Circle messaging plan of $7.99 or higher on Alltel will now get unlimited messaging within their Circle, while the non-Circle bucket starts at 400 per month. The $19.99 "All Access Pass" is still available too, which rocks unlimited messaging to everyone regardless of whether they're cool enough to be in your Circle -- and it includes mobile web access, to boot. The new plans are available immediately.

Between this, voice-to-text, and text-to-voice systems, the lines between talking and texting are getting very blurred indeed. NEC used the NXTcomm show in Las Vegas to show off its "Bubble Text" technology, which is really nothing more than voice SMS -- record a quick snippet of talking, send it off, and the recipient gets a note in his or her inbox with your sonorous speech attached to it. At a high level, it's no different than attaching a sound clip to an MMS, but NEC appears to have streamlined the software to the point where setting up and sending the message is no more difficult than sending a traditional text -- and depending on your circumstances, it can actually be quite a bit easier since there's no actual texting involved. NEC claims that seven carriers have already deployed Bubble Talk, and it's in talks (bubble talks?) with several others. Follow the break for a video of Bubble Talk in action.

[Via Unwired View]

The hot new smartphone plan might be the big news out of Verizon so far this week, but riding those coattails are a series of interesting new messaging offerings as well. The plans are targeted squarely at folks who put a bigger emphasis on text allowances than they do on voice minutes, and have allegedly been willed into existence as a direct result of customer feedback. Actually, you don't even need any voice plan at all to make these bad boys happen on your bill. So-called "consumer devices" get dinged for $34.99 a month (mobile email's an extra $5 here) while owners of BlackBerrys and PDA / smartphone class devices pay $54.99, getting in return an unlimited dosage of messaging and on-device data usage; calls run 40 and 25 cents per minute, respectively. If you let your thumbs do 90 percent of the talking on a daily basis, this might just be your hook-up.

[Via Phone Scoop]

Whoa there, didn't these just go up not long ago? Indeed they did, but in the fast-paced, money-grubbing world we call home, two price bumps spaced a year apart are sadly par for the course. AT&T has started informing customers that unless they're subscribed to a messaging plan, they'll be paying 5 cents more for both text messages and picture / video messages -- now up to 20 and 30 cents per, respectively. The change takes effect March 30, so we'd recommend you either tell all your peeps to cut it out with the messaging or sign up with a package by then. Follow the break for AT&T's full manifesto.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Verizon has recently told its subscribers to expect a healthy bump in their text messaging rates, going from 15 cents to 20 cents this March for domestic texts to match Sprint's numbers. The change only affects postpaid customers; prepaid dudes and gals soldier on at 2 to 10 cents per, depending on plan. Incoming international texts go up from 15 to 20 cents, too, though the outgoing rate remains unchanged at 25 cents. Whether that'll hold if some random patent holding firm wins bazillions from Big Red, well, that's another matter entirely.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

At first, we sorta thought those air raid sirens (you know, the ones that are freakin' loud enough to wake the dead) were enough of an "emergency alert" as it was, but consider this: they usually don't tell you the nature of the emergency or give you instructions on exactly how you're supposed to proceed. That's not the sirens' fault -- a mind-numbingly loud "whoop whoop" really doesn't have the bandwidth to reveal that kind of information to the human ear -- but now that SMS-capable phones are ubiquitous, it's time to smarten things up just a tad. The government's Emergency Alert System has had just such a plan in the works for a while now, and Sprint Nextel is becoming the first national carrier to trial a system capable of sending targeted, location based alerts when bad stuff goes down. The trial is taking place in scenic Contra Costa, California; no word on a national rollout, but if you find out about your next tornado, earthquake, or other scary sitch via text, your area have just gotten swept into the craze.

Despite skyrocketing growth, it's no secret that acceptance of text messaging in the US is still light years behind Europe and Asia. Countries around the world have been using SMS as a viable, effective method to get out the vote ahead of elections for years, and although we've seen sporadic efforts to do the same stateside, there has been no concentrated effort that has yielded tangible, measurable results. Of course, that's likely to change over the course of the next two or three presidential elections; young'uns in the US are far more likely than any other age group to send and receive text messages, after all, and those crafty politicians are always looking for exciting new ways to trumpet their agendas. Indeed, AFP points out that three Democratic candidates for the 2008 presidency -- Obama, Clinton, and Edwards -- have SMS short codes set up that let folks subscribe to campaign updates (interestingly, no Republican candidates have followed suit so far). A study by a Princeton grad student looking into technology in elections showed that people who were texted shortly before an election were a full four percent more likely to vote; while that doesn't sound like a big number, it's huge when you're talking about a national election where a single percent accounts for a million or more voters. Heck, who knows, in 20 years, we could all be voting by SMS, American Idol-style.

Golly, we heart iPhone hackers. Seriously, is there anything these cats can't do? Short of magically bestowing our favorite Apple phone (see what we did there?) with 3G data, we're pretty confident that the dev community is going to end up fulfilling every last wish that Apple doesn't. A ModMyiPhone member has busted out an early release of a true, honest-to-goodness native MMS app, filling in perhaps one of the biggest gaps in the iPhone's out of the box functionality (yeah, we know you can MMS most carriers' phones via email, but it's still super annoying), and even better, it seriously looks stock from the screen shots. It's apparently still got a few issues -- and it's send-only for the moment -- but it's a great start. Keep on keepin' on, fellas!

Among a host of other improvements getting rolled out to Yahoo Mail this week comes this little gem: integrated support for SMS. Already having supported email and chat directly from the Mail client itself, text messaging seems like a logical jump, offering users the capability to fire up a text conversation with little more than a phone number and a few lines of text (remember, keep it brief!). Initially available to folks in the US, Canada, India, and the Philippines, the service should do a fine job of burning through hundreds of your closest friends' text messaging plans -- a solid reason to start upgrading to those unlimited packages that carriers are starting to push, we reckon.

Vodafone's British arm has partnered with Broca Communications to offer its Secure Advanced Message Service -- cleverly named "SAMS" for short -- to business customers. Sitting atop SMS, SAMS offers encrypted messaging for those times when you simply must know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the "meet 4 dnr?" you just received is authentic. Of course, security has its price; the service will be billed on a per-message basis, which pretty much explains why it's being pitched to Voda's enterprise user base.

[Via texutally.org]

The unlimited text, picture, and video messaging that Verizon customers on plain-vanilla plans have enjoyed for a few weeks now is moving on to spread its love to other segments of the market. Push-to-talk plans are next, with unlimited messaging running $20 above and beyond the standard plan cost -- a tad steep, yes, although it includes messaging on any network. With the new feature, individual PTT plans start at $70.