While WAP usage in m-commerce applications has been slow, SMS has gained wide popularity because of its simplicity and accessibility.

Although SMS has been around for less than a decade (the first short message was sent in December 1992 from a PC to a mobile phone on the Vodafone GSM network in the UK), its market penetration rate has been quite impressive.

In many parts of Europe and Asia, SMS is even more popular than voice services. Many m-commerce applications, mostly user-orientated, have taken advantage of this popularity.

Real-time information services have become one of the most popular SMS applications.

Subscribers to specific services receive regular updates on their mobile phones about areas of interest such as share prices, weather, sports scores, news headlines, and flight information.

In addition to pushing public information such as flight information, these services could add more value if they were also used to pull private information, such as personal agendas, out of the user's private database. The user would then be provided with enough data to make an informed decision.

Electronic commerce transactions, which involve using SMS to finalise a purchase transaction, requires tight integration with the merchant systems, strong support from banking gateways, and a solid security model.

Generally 160 characters are sufficient for transmitting most delivery addresses, such as those required in a sales or service transaction. For example, pizza delivery, home removals, or express couriers. The sales or service person can also use SMS to send updated job status reports back to headquarters.

Remote monitoring is also popular in the IT environment where servers are remotely monitored. SMS adds another channel to the existing monitoring and alerting systems. It can become especially handy when a support request is escalated and requires immediate attention by a mobile service person.

A common question facing businesses nowadays is whether existing applications should be SMS enabled. Although integrating SMS into existing applications is a simple architectural decision, its limitations must be weighted carefully against its application suitability.

Being a first-generation GSM service, SMS messages are plain text. There is no scope for audio or video. This limitation makes SMS unsuitable for multimedia applications, such as content-rich advertising. However, advances in EMS (Enhanced Messaging Service) have helped fill this gap by introducing a richer message format combining text, black-andwhite pictures, simple melodies, and animations to an EMS-compliant handset. Further in the evolutionary horizon of SMS is the MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) standard which will require significant infrastructure changes. MMS supports colour pictures and interactive video.

The use of MMS would remove the limitation SMS has of being restricted to 160 characters in length. SMS also has high data rate and latency. MMS, using its own data channel, has high data rate but lower latency.

SMS operators use many different proprietary protocols, X.25 being the most popular among them. Therefore applications need to have different interface implementations for different SMS centres. Also, users may find SMS has a very awkward input mechanism, making it inconvenient to type long messages. This limitation could be resolved by advances in predictive text input algorithms and voice recognition technology for mobile devices.

Duc Do is a director of Commercial Interactive Media. He can be contacted on 03 9419 4900 or at duc.do@cim.com.au.

Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CBS Interactive. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CBS Interactive.