A text message or SMS (Short Message Service) is a message
of no more than 160 characters that is sent to and/or from a
mobile phone. It is the mobile equivalent to an email message.
If you get a message of more than 160 characters, it is actually
2 messages that have been joined by your operator back into
one message.
SMS started almost by accident as a way for the networks
engineers to communicate with each other using unneeded
network time, but has grown from a standing start in 1996 to
around 100m messages per day in the UK alone.
While MMS (Multi Media Messaging) is now available,
experts see SMS as the dominant methodolgy for at least
another 10 years
