is texting a fad?

[Kenny C]

Bwanna,

Are you and Dewdrop the only ladies here?

[JorgeAmely]

i must admit i am an avid texter i send on average 3000 messages a month

100 per day? 6 per hour? You have a very social "virtual" life.

[bwanna]

Bwanna,

Are you and Dewdrop the only ladies here?
[/quote

once in a while a gal named ellen drops in. .....

[Kenny C]

jorge,

thats just an average sometimes more sometimes less its fairly easy to send 100 messages in a day for me i have wore alot of the keys offf on my phone too lol 

[JorgeAmely]

Ok Kenny, since you are a heavy duty text-er, how come you text rather than talk to your friends?

[Kenny C]

i find it easier to do other tasks while texting so you don't ignore the other person while you are on the phone and not all of my friends have AT&T so i cant call them it uses minutes We have a family plan and we have unlimited text so I can text them as much as i want and it doesn't cost any minutes.

[McHeath]

Wow, 3000 texts a month.  I'd have to work pretty hard to do that.  My cell phone plan gives me 1000 a month, and once I tried really hard to see how many I could manage to send and got to about 300, but lost my mojo at that point.

Texting is very handy, there are times when a nice quiet message to someone is more appropriate than a call.  It has reduced, or so it seems to me in my subjective observations, that texting becoming do dominant has reduced the number of inane cell phone calls that we are forced to listen to out in public. 

[bellsystemproperty]

You must have one of those cell phones with the qwerty keyboards then. As for me, I dislike texting. I don't even really like using my cell phone, because it has poor sound quality (8kbps compression, a landline has 64kbps).

One area texting can have some value in is giving directions to someone. You can send them your address, instead of telling them 544 Oak Street and then having them say, "Well I drove to 544 Goat Street and you weren't there."

[Russ Kirk]

It is amazing how fast some of these teenagers can send SMS messages. 

Here is classic demonstration of a Morse code vs. texting - sending the exact same message. 

Note - the teen is using a Non-qwerty handset.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=2025791097

I occasionally use SMS to send a brief message,  but some people carry on conversations, thus sending several messages in a short timeframe. These SMS conversations can be conducted without disturbing surrounding people. But often times teens use it as a way of communicating openly without allowing nearby people to eavesdrop on the conversation. 

Russ...

[Dan/Panther]

I would have thought texting would be quicker as you only need one digit per letter, as opposed to several for each Morse code letter.
I hope they don't attempt that same test with dial vs. touch tone !
D/P

[paul-f]

Interesting demo, but the result depends so much on the participants.

Even though I learned morse code as a teenager, if I was on the morse code team, the texters would win easily.  On the other hand, I've known many morse code pros who can copy at incredible rates.

[Dennis Markham]

Some of those Ham radio guys can do double Morse code...where it makes contact on the up-swing and  not just when tapped down.  That's some fancy coding!  I don't know any human can "read" that it's so fast.

[Dan/Panther]

A story I read, I don't know if it is true for sure, but was told it is.
Gene Autry was a telegrapher, the way he got the job was all eligible applicants were sitting in the outer office of the telegraphy office, and they could hear the operator sending out messages, After the first message, Gene got up and walked into the inner office, the other applicants were puzzled , actually the operator was sending message, "If you can understand this message, you have the job, come into the office right away."
gene was the only, or first one, to understand the message.
D/P

[bingster]

Russkirk mentioned the phone isn't a keyboard model, which means each letter sent requires the depression of a button once, twice or even three times.  Given how quickly a letter can be sent by an experienced code keyer, I'm not surprised by the result.  Neat video.

[benhutcherson]

One of the things that I find interesting is that-in a sense-texting itself has now come full circle.

The iPhone, and others I'm sure also, have voice recognition that allows one to speak a text message and let the phone transcribe it.

I don't personally text, but my experience with using the voice recognition for e-mail and other things on the iPhone is that it's amazingly accurate right out of the box.