Earlier this year we noted that over 6 trillion text messages were sent in 2010, a rise of 41% compared to the year before. The growth may have been declining – SMS saw a 53% increase from 2008 to 2009 – but SMS and MMS are still going strong. This is in spite of social media like Twitter and Facebook having grabbed many of the headlines.

But what did it look like for the Christmas and New Year we’ve just been through?

Looking at multiple countries and carriers

Tero Kuittinen, writing for Forbes, noted a decline in the number of text messages sent this holiday season in a number of countries. Several other sites picked up the same topic, and one site even claimed that this was “a danger sign for carriers.”

Curious as we are we wanted to try to figure out what the situation was like around the world and after some time with our noses in search engines, here’s what we found (The source for each line is linked to in the first column. In the 2011 column, green indicates an increase from 2010, red indicates a decrease):

Mixed picture

Looking at these numbers, it seems like those who have already declared the death of SMS have done so prematurely.

There’s no denying that for most operators and countries, the volume of text messaging is declining when comparing the holidays seasons in 2010 and 2011. But it’s also true that in some cases the volume has increased, even quite substantially.

This is of course just a comparison of a few days in two consecutive years so it’s not anything statistically significant.

Perhaps when we add the numbers for this year’s holiday season we can start talking about some definite trends.

Photo by FaceMePLS.

Perceptions matter, and the perception of Nokia in the news, on the web, and in the minds of many, is that things aren’t going that well. Even in the Pingdom office, we hear “Nokia is doomed,” but do the numbers support this belief?

Looking at the statistics, Symbian leads the mobile operating system race with just over 30% of web browsing traffic. That’s down slightly from late last year, when we noted that Symbian finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system, with almost 34% of the mobile OS market.

What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

Read more

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we talk mainly about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Some fresh research shows an increase in smaller, more targeted DDoS attacks, and hacker group Anonymous has vowed to take down the Internet by launching a DDoS attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

Read more

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on OpenStack.

Read more

By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many are added each day, each week, or each minute? We think we have a pretty good idea.

Read on for some pretty amazing numbers.

Read more

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we can finally talk about Saleh’s Carbon for Windows Phone app being available in Windows Marketplace. We also talk to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC.com about the world of supercomputers.

Read more