Think you’re awash in text messages now? Just wait

Flashback to April 3, 1973. The first-ever portable cellular phone call is placed by Marty Cooper, an engineer at Motorola. He dialed a competing engineer at Bell Labs to let him know he'd beat him to the punch.

In the 25 years since that first call, the number of wireless phone users worldwide has swelled to more than 3 billion.

Fast forward to December 1992. The first text message is sent. I don't know what the message was, but it led to a reply or two, or three, or several billion. Today there are more text messages sent every day than there are people on the planet. That's more than 6.5 billion text messages in the last 24 hours. More than 43 billion text messages were sent worldwide last New Year's Eve alone, Sprint Nextel Corp. President and Chief Executive Officer Dan Hesse said at the CTIA Wireless 2008 conference last week in Las Vegas. You may think your kids are responsible for the bulk of these messages, but I'd argue that my kids are the ones with the flying thumbs.

And this is only the beginning.

The wireless industry is now offering mobile broadband at speeds rivaling your office and home high-speed connections in several U.S. cities. You'll soon be seeing offers for WiMax and 4G from many mobile companies. In layman's terms, they mean fast, wireless broadband connectivity. Really fast.

More than a million U.S. customers use wireless broadband as their primary method of connecting to the Internet. They've said farewell to their cable modems and digital subscriber lines -- the traditional wired methods for high-speed connections.

The consumer is the driving force, Hesse said.

"They want everything, now," he said. "Speed is crucial. People know what they want, when they want it and it has to be easy to use and simple to understand."

Sprint and many of the other wireless companies are now offering simpler, all-you-can-eat rate plans for both voice and data services. No more worrying about how many minutes you have left before the higher rates kick in or how many Web pages you're surfing on your smart phone.

And those smart phones are just going to get smarter and smarter. Samsung will be offering the Instinct and Sony Ericsson will unveil the Xperia X1 later this year. Everyone is chasing the Apple iPhone, which has sold more than 4 million units so far.

Yahoo is in the middle of the swelling wireless industry, announcing their new suite of mobile software. One Search 2.0 is available now, which includes a voice-input search for users with BlackBerrys.

For more information, visit mobile.yahoo.com/onesearch.

I'll have more from CTIA Wireless next week.

Share your Internet story with me at agibes@reviewjournal.com.