Home takes over your phone's homescreen and pushes your Facebook messages to the forefront, presumably in the hope that you'll use the feature as an alternative to texting. With its Qwerty keyboard and WhatsApp branding, the phone has instant messaging at its core - much like the budget BlackBerry phones, which became popular among teenagers a few years ago thanks to their price and the convenience of BBM.įacebook is also hoping to butt in on the instant-messaging conversation, with its Android launcher Facebook Home. Nokia last week unveiled the cheap and cheerful Asha 210, the first phone to incorporate a dedicated WhatsApp button. They're trying to rake that back by persuading more of us to take out contracts, and selling extras such as data. It does mean phone networks are being deprived of income they used to rake in from texts, with Ovum estimating around £15bn of revenue was lost due to the popularity of chat apps last year. Most work on a free or seriously cheap subscription basis, allowing for unlimited exchange of messages and eliminating any real excuse for txt spk (thank goodness).
Instant messaging via apps such as WhatsApp or Viber, or platform-specific services like iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) have drastically reduced the cost of firing mini missives between phones, as customers aren't charged per message. Users of chat apps were found to be about six times more sociable than texters, sending around 32 messages on average every day, compared with just five texts.
Chat apps such as WhatsApp and Viber are more popular than texting for the first time ever, according to stats from research firm Informa.Īlmost 19 billion messages were sent per day using chat apps in 2012, compared to only 17.6 billion SMS messages, the BBC reports.
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