Britain remains in the grip of a texting mania as new figures reveal around 99 million text messages were faithfully banged out on little keypads every day during February.
The numbers released by the Mobile Data Association (MDA) show that person-to-person texting has soared by a whopping 26 per cent compared to the same period last year.
Valentine’s Day turned out to be a bumper texting bonanza with 120 million little bundles of love text being SMS’d to loved ones (our modesty prevents us from revealing the proportion of that figure that were sent to digi-lifestyles staff).
The SMS stats revealed that while love may be – quite literally – in the air, most people preferred to profess it from the comfort of their keypad, with only ten million romantics going to the trouble of sending a proper Valentine’s card through the post.
Despite the bumper figures for February, last December still holds the record for the highest monthly total of texts, notching up keypad-melting 3.113 billion texts.
The MDA has forecast that text messaging figures will reach an annual total of 36.5 billion text messages by the end of 2006, compared to 2005’s 32 billion total.
Those who like to peruse pretty graphs and inhale feasts’o’figures are recommended to point their browsers in the direction of Text It where a veritable stat frenzy awaits.
LG have announced a unique new phone, the LG-SD910, featuring what the Korean manufacturing giants are describing as a ‘Duo Slide Design.’ 
Looking a bit of a moody number in its all-black skin and glowing red buttons, the LG-SD910 sports a large 260k colour QVGA* TFT LCD screen (*that’s 320 x 240 pixels in English). 
Despite its unusual construction and feature set, when all the slidey bits are tucked in the LG-SD910’s a surprisingly compact gizmo, measuring a pocketable 87 x 44 x 23 mm and weighing in at 90g. 
A new service, Barablu, launches today claiming to offer free voice calls and text messages between mobile phones.
It’s as clear as the screen on your PSP that mobile phone operators aren’t very keen on ideas like this. Many commentators have claimed that the operators have gone a long way to trying to block the development and sale of WiFi-capable mobile phones – as the operators are terrified that it will erode the price of calls from ‘quite a lot’ per minute, to zero. 
Barablu does appear to have something unique here – at least currently. The difficulty they’re going to hit is the same for anyone trying to build a community of users and provide this type of service -it’s all about the number of people you can attract on to it. If people find their friends aren’t on it, or their said friends already have a similar service – the software will get unloaded and they’ll stop using it. 
Slimmer than a stick insect with the runs, the new world’s thinnest phone comes in the shape of the EV-K100 handset, an ultra-thin gizmo made by Korean cell phone makers KTF Technologies. 
“We substantially cut down the thickness of the antenna incorporated into the EV-K100 and instead extended its length to secure all the necessary functions,” said a KTF spokesman. 
The company intend to market the bar-type EV-K100, codenamed “No. 7,” from next week via its parent firm KTF for around 400,000 won ($412). 
Suppose you ran a Web site, and got a little money in advertising. And then suppose someone came along, and said: “I can give you more readers, and extra advertising!” – would you be grateful? Especially if this was genuine, and tested out? Well, 
The Kryptonite comparison, summary: inhabitants of the InterWeb Blogland discovered you could steal a bike locked with Kryptonite even if all you had was a ball point pen, and Kryptonite dismissed those quaint Bloglanders as irrelevant. Well, yes; if you sell a product which is shown to be non-functional, you need to deal with the bad press. 
Now, I can see Google’s point. “What is this guy’s problem?” you might say. After all, most adverts on Web pages are there without the explicit consent of the site manager. One-click and other advert providers post adverts “on the fly” and track the individual user. Click on one advert for fast cars, and they’ll probably show you more next time you visit; and they don’t ring up the Web site manager and ask specific permission. They just download the advert. (Eventually. When you’re almost out of patience, and thinking of switching to Firefox and running Adblock. Another story…) 
The US mobile companies are finally, really getting hold of delivering content of all sorts to mobile phones. 
As with all things to mobile phones, we’d love to see the figures as to who actually pays for access to this. A barrier which has yet to be consistently cracked. 
With a veritable orgy of announcements, BenQ Mobile rolled out six new mobile phones at the CeBIT trade show in Germany.
VoIP calls are made possible through the built in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity and pre-loaded Skype software.
Also announced was the flagship EL71, a tri-band, 16.5mm thin slider phone with a metal casing in brushed aluminium finish. Designed for the “young professional,” the phone sports a 2-inch, 260,000-color QVGA display.
The CL71 slide phone is another slim number (17.8mm) with built-in 1.3-megapixel camera, MP3 player and radio with a 2-inch TFT 262k display offering 176 x 220 picture resolution.
Finally, the wedge shaped E61 comes in orange, yellow, or silver, with a built-in VGA camera with 2x/4x digital zoom.
Currently hovering betwixt prototype and retail status, Advance Tech Communications new Windows Mobile smartphone market looks hot! hot! hot!
On board storage is taken care of courtesy of a generous 8GB hard disk, backed up by 512MB RAM and 512MB ROM, with a micro-SD expansion card slot.
Instead, the company are proclaiming their new device to be a “laptop computer miniaturised to the size of a handheld device,” which perhaps isn’t the snappiest description they could have come up with.
Nokia has launched Nokia Lifeblog 2.0, an updated version of their photo-blogging offering.
Well, that’s how we’d describe the process, but Nokia has a more flowery interpretation, insisting that adding the extra information is “rendering them as part of the rich tapestry of items that make up your personal Nokia Lifeblog timeline.” 
“With imaging becoming an integral part of mobile devices, the way people approach photography is changing. You are able to capture events and create memories in a spontaneous way as your device is always with you,” gushed Mikko Pilkama, whose job title is surely unpronounceable after five beers: Director, Nokia Nseries See New, Multimedia, Nokia.