PBS

MediaShift: Spain’s National Obsession With Mobiles, Texting
June 13, 2008

by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo

I asked tech consultant and blogger Michael Mace, who wrote a very detailed and enlightening blog post about the differing mobile cultures, why he thought the use of SMS in Europe evolved the way it did.

“Fixed-line phones were hard to get in Europe and expensive, so mobile phone usage took off there much more aggressively than it did in the U.S.” he said. “Prices for texting in Europe were lower than prices for phone calls, so people had an economic incentive to text. In the U.S., mobile service was not as reliable as in Europe, fixed-line phones were cheap, many more people had PCs, and IM was completely free. So texting never became the big force here that it is in Europe (and in much of Asia).”

The original publication can be found at this link.

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