A quick note of another study, this time by ABI Research, that mobile messaging (SMS) is and will continue to be the top use, after voice, for cellphones — see SMS to Garner 83% of All Mobile Messaging Revenues through 2013 (ABI Research). Another important point made by the research is that companies are looking into SMS for other opportunities:

“Innovative companies are exploring opportunities for expanding mobile messaging access to Web sites as well as targeting customers with content and ads,” says principal analyst Dan Shey. “To be successful with these enhanced services, companies that supply mobile messaging products and services must understand the regional distributions for customer type, payment preferences, message delivery method, and usage.”

If your application includes a “communication” piece, make sure it supports SMS; even for services such as information retrieval, SMS is proving to be extremely useful.

For now, SMS wins over Mobile IM (MIM), and it will continue to be the case until MIM exposes all the same characteristics as SMS, including simplicity, guaranteed to work/message delivery across networks, direct yet deferred messaging, and understood billing.

The future of mobile messaging is (or should be) a hybrid approach to SMS and MIM, that will offer the best of both worlds; see Analysis and Opinions on the Future of Messaging (About Mobility).

Related to this:

ceo