UK addiction for texting drives mobile news alerts

The ever growing usage of text messaging in the UK is driving the development of mobile news services.

The Mobile Data Association (MDA)’s first quarter mobile trends report shows 57 billion text messages were sent in the UK last year, up from 42 billion in the previous year.

Various reports say the ever increasing growth in SMS messaging is helping to boost the popularity of  mobile news services in the UK.

And the hunger for messaging has continued to grow into 2008 with a record 6.3 billion texts sent in January alone, more than 5,000 a second.

There has also been a growth in the number of UK mobile internet users, up to 17.5 million while 449 million picture messages  were also sent last year.