MDA says UK's 2009s text message total was 96.8 billion.
The UK trade body says that the 2009 daily average was 265 million text messages and 1.6 million picture messages. Over 600 million picture messages were sent across the whole year.
As ever, there was a spike on Christmas day as phone users spread festive cheer using the medium of SMS. There were 874m texts and 4.5 million picture messages sent.
Steve Reynolds, MDA chairman, said: “These statistics show that even with new social media forms of messaging such as Twitter and Facebook, people are using SMS as a social messaging tool because of its simplicity and ubiquity.
"There remains a significant and still developing role for text messaging. In a seemingly relentless tide of status updates, tweets and pokes, the UK population’s love affair with mobile messaging for instant, on-the-go communication continues to deepen ”
Here are the headline numbers:
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2009 messages sent
SMS
2009 total 96.8 billion
2008 total 78.9 billion
2007 total 56.9 billion
MMS
2009 total 601 million
2008 total 553 million
2007 total 449 million
