The mobile text message has today celebrated 20 years of revolutionising the way people communicate, although there are the first signs that consumers are now falling out of love with short messaging services (SMS). The first ever text was sent on December 3, 1992, by a 22-year-old British engineer called Neil Papworth, who used his computer to fire off the message "Merry Christmas" to an Orbitel 901 mobile phone. SMS, individual messages of 160 characters sent to contacts on mobile devices and computers, pre-dated Twitter as a way to communicate with only a minimum of information. It gave birth to so-called 'text speak', including time-saving abbreviated messages such as, 'Txt celebr8s its bday', often accompanied by smiley face markers, such as :-). But SMS also prompted the emergence of some less savoury practices, such as 'sexting', in which (more)...