Cell Phone Statistics

Nearly 50% of employees spend more than 20% of their time away from their desks creating an even more mobile workforce.

In February 2007, 3.9 billion text messages were sent. That figure increased to 4.4 billion in March, 2007 according to the Mobile Data Association (MDA).

The idea for text messaging began in the 1980’s. No one person can be credited with inventing it.

The first commercial text message was sent over the Vodaphone GSM network in the Untied Kingdom on December 3, 1992.

The Philippines alone sends on the average 400 million text messages a day, more than the annual average SMS volume of the countries in Europe, and even China and India.

In January 2001, Joseph Estrada was forced to resign from the post of president of the Philippines. The popular campaign against him was widely reported to have been coordinated with SMS chain letters.

In the Netherlands, police use text messaging to receive crime tips and send alerts of missing children.

In 2003 a Malaysian court ruled that, under Sharia law, a man may divorce his wife via text messaging as long as the message was clear and unequivocal.

The amount of text messages per month has grown 250% each year for the last two years.

US Mobile content market = 68.7 million text users.

Median age of a text message user is 38 years old. 51% are women, 49% are men.

In Australia, about 14 million people are spending over $8 billion annually on their mobile phones.

One in three college students now send mobile messages from their cell phones.

Right after the Oct. 8 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, Pakistan, the goverment granted free mobile cell phone use so that separated families could find one another.

Mobile phone owners were able to pledge a donation to disaster relief after the Asian Tsunami by texting “donate” to short code.

Since November, 700 students, or 44 percent of those admitted to Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, have been notified through a text message on their cell phones.

Cell phones are so common in China that authorities used text messages to warn millions of residents of the impending landfall of Typhoon Kaemi.

An asthma management program at San Mateo Medical Center in California uses text messaging to monitor patients’ compliance with treatment regimens. The program has reduced emergency-room visits and is considered a cost-saving strategy for the hospital.