SMS Spain

SMS Spain

Interessante post do Panic {RE}_Programming mostrando o uso dos telefones celulares na Espanha onde segundo dados recentes, há mais telefones celulares do que habitantes no país, é uma prática corrente a troca de SMS e mesmo o uso de “missed calls” para não pagar. Prática muito comum no Brasil também.

Vejam alguns trechos.

“(…) To say that Spain is crazy for cell phones is an understatement. Approximately 44 million people live in Spain, but in January of this year the number of cell phones in the country reached 50 million. There are more phones than people here. While Americans might also be addicted to the cell, the Spanish relationship with the cell phone has evolved differently from ours for reasons that are clear and others that remain a mystery.

(…)Here in Spain, this is what most people think of when you say ‘mobile content.’ A lot of money is spent on accessorizing the mobile by ordering games over SMS or on being afforded the right to see your comment crawl across the TV screen when you’ve got something to say, moments after sending a text message to your favorite show. I can’t see most Americans shelling out money for this kind of thing, but Spain leads the entire European region in purchasing this type of ‘content.’ Recent projections show that Spaniards will download over 17 million games for their cell phones this year over WAP or SMS. Like a pampered pet, the cell phone is forever in hand, and is being primped and well taken care of by its owner. (…) Spaniards of all ages must spend half of their waking hours sending text messages, and they were doing it back then, when I hadn’t a clue what SMS was. As if adjusting to a new country weren’t enough, I then had to learn a new language: text messaging. While Americans were in the dark ages of SMS, Europeans had long since embraced the technology. And that’s why Spaniards’ SMS messages — much more evolved — often look like ciphers requiring the intervention of some code expert. Ask someone to go out with you, and they might reply “NT1D” (“I don’t have a cent”).
(…) Whatever it has become, in the beginning it was just a way to save money when communicating. Another very interesting (presumably Spanish) cost-related work-around that I was introduced to and quickly adopted was ‘the missed call.’ If you are going to meet up with someone, they might say ‘I’ll do a missed call when I get there.’ That means they will ring your cell when they arrive so you know to look for them.

(…)Here, most all of my friends are professionals but none carry Blackberries and none have an Internet data plan on their phones. They don’t surf the web on their devices, and they don’t send emails. A 2006 study estimated that only 300,000 workers in Spain used mobile email) and most don’t do anything except call and text.

(…) What I have seen happen here is that people adapt their mobile habits to their circumstances. If calls are expensive, they use SMS. And if calls are so expensive, so are data plans, so forget about using the mobile Internet. So media is inevitably left out of the mobile equation.(…)”