About of 25% of IM users do it on their mobile phones, according to the second annual AP-AOL Instant Messaging Trends Survey. Thanks to full keyboard features on many mobile phones, it is now very easy to chat with your online buddies.
As expected, the teen market is more receptive to this convergence with 32% engaging in mobile IM. The sample size of this new survey is 1,246 IM users – 836 adults aged 19 and older and 410 teens aged 13-18.
Since most mobile contracts include monthly allocation for text messaging, mobile IM won't have much impact against SMS revenues, at least for now. Moreover, I don't see mobile IM replacing SMS given that many new services like cellity freeSMS offer free text messanging services worldwide. A more interesting challenge is how SMS will evolve in order to integrate with these new alternatives.
In case you have different IM accounts, you may want to use trutap to communicate because it has a multi-chat tool. Don't worry it's free!
Via MobHappy
November 23rd, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Some mobile IM such as AIM on Sprint’s network actually use SMS. So each message cost money if you don’t already have a text message plan.