Why SMS will take some toppling

Another week, another innovative and impressive use for SMS text messages - the technology which refuses to be limited by its obvious limitations.

Catching criminals has now been added to the list of things you can do in 160 characters or less, as the German police announced plans to quickly disseminate descriptions of wanted felons and details of stolen cars via text message to a network of mobile phone users, including public transport staff.

Add this to the plethora of other services, from Big Brother voting to tracking down lost luggage or sending wedding invites, and you get a picture of SMS as a technology which knows no bounds.

And to think, people have suggested MMS and 3G will replace SMS.

Speaking at the SMS 02 show at Olympia, Mike Grenville, CEO and founder of SMS and mobile messaging association 160 Characters, told silicon.com: "With MMS and 3G the operators are spending too much money and the technology and services aren't ready yet."

Pointing to some of the teething problems which have plagued early adopters of MMS, such as inter-network incompatibility, Grenville added: "SMS is widely used and is a standard which everybody can develop upon. It's not the case that some people have 95 characters and others have 120 - everybody has 160."

In fact the possibilities with SMS seem limitless - often as much about lifestyle choices as necessity. Another exhibitor at SMS 02 has just launched a location-based service in conjunction with London free-paper Metro.

If you are an O2 or Vodafone customer, simply key words such as 'pub' or 'bar' into your phone, or be more specific and add 'comedy', 'late' or 'music' for example, and send your message to the short code 88021 and within minutes, sometimes seconds, you will receive details of your nearest pub. You can even specify whether you want to 'pull' and it will give you details of the nearest pub suitable for meeting members of the opposite sex - complete with an age, wealth and beauty guide to the kind of totty you can expect to meet there.

The service has a database of more than 2,000 pubs and bars in the London area and Mobile Commerce, the company behind it, plans to launch similar services for cinemagoers in 2003. It's a variation upon a popular theme, explored in the past by less intuitive business models, but one which seems to be working.

Bryan Stockwell, head of business development at Mobile Commerce, said he believes similar services via MMS, while they could be more detailed and include features such as maps, are still years away. Even then it is unlikely any service could topple the dominance of SMS.

But while SMS seems to have made itself an irreplaceable technology, Stockwell says there is still more that could be done by all parties to make text messaging a more attractive option for the business implementer.

Stockwell says operators still refuse to offer companies such as his a service level agreement. The absence of SLAs means his company can promise to justify your 50p per message cost by sending you details of a pub within seconds but if the message then takes hours to arrive, as was the case when silicon.com first tested it, there is no course of action his company can take, even if the fault lies with the operator.

This frustration is compounded by the fact that operators are still taking a disproportionate amount of the revenue from such services (see http://www.silicon.com/a55900 for more).

One other problem which is being overcome with varying degrees of success is the thorny issue of billing. Some network operators charge for outgoing messages, others charge for the incoming message.

The resolution of such a non-standards issue would certainly further increase the capabilities of SMS firms. And as with the issue of revenue sharing and SLAs it suggests, it is the operators who still have some way to go in shaping the future of SMS. It was an assertion backed up by the general mood among delegates and exhibitors at SMS 02.

But one thing is for sure - by next week we will doubtless have yet another innovative use of SMS to add to the list below.

What are your best experiences of SMS? What applications and uses can you recommend.