U.S. late to join text-messaging party - Americans, however, are ready for next high-tech wave to hit.



For a nation that prides itself on technological leadership, the U.S. was surprisingly late to the text messaging game. But it is making up for lost time.



The number of texts sent in the U.S. is expected to increase dramatically from 8.1 billion messages in 2002, according to technology research group Ovum. Such figures are often disputed and hard to collate, but experts say about one billion texts are sent in the U.S. per month.



The watershed came when AT&T Wireless, the nation’s second-largest mobile phone group by revenues, sponsored text voting for the reality TV series American Idol. More than 7.5 million American Idol-related texts were sent during the contest, and a third of the senders had never texted before. The final was the largest single text-messaging event handled by a mobile phone carrier in the world.