Mobile adoption trends continue to increase in Canada

The CWTA released their quarterly report last week and highlights are consistent with year long trends.

More Canadians are texting more often.

It will be interesting to see if proposed new charges for incoming texting as announced last week by Bell and Telus will impact overall numbers. It will also be neat to see the impact of the iphone…  will Canadians text even more or will they simply migrate to mobile instant messaging (MIM), Twitter, and other mobile web based communication options?

I know - it’s not just about the iphone - super awesome third generation mobile devices from Blackberry (Bold), Palm (Centro) and Samsung (Instinct) promise to make the next quarter an exciting one for our market.

Here are some highlights to the report:

• 4.1 billion messages were sent peer to peer in Q1 (note messages related to mobile marketing campaigns are not counted). Note that 10.1 billion were sent in all of 2007
• 1.4 billion messages were sent in March 2008 alone
• 42% of Canadian mobile subscribers sent at least one peer-to-peer message in March 2008. Imagine what that number would if your friends who return your text with a phone call because they don’t know how to text… figured it out?
• MMS-capable common short codes were made available for the first time
• As of May 14th, North America’s first user-generated mobile picture messaging service on broadcast television was launched in Canada
• There are 25 active mobile micro-payments (m-commerce) applications approved in Canada