SINGAPORE The humble, relatively low-tech short message service, or SMS, is being hailed as the darling of the telecommunications industry following the dramatic failure of its flashier cousin, WAP. Initially shunned in favor of the more futuristic wireless application protocol, which aimed to bring the Internet to the mobile phone's tiny screen, SMS has been sending cash registers ringing and even helped topple an Asian president in January. Telecommunications experts at this week's Communicasia 2001 trade fair here said SMS, which allows people to send brief messages by just pressing a few buttons on their mobile phones, still has plenty of room to grow especially in Asia, which already accounts for a large part of world SMS usage. Apart from allowing for instantaneous exchanging of messages, SMS can also be used to deliver information on demand such as news, sports results, and weather information. By the end of last year, 12 billion SMS messages were being sent monthly worldwide, said Jyrki Halttunen, vice president for mobile Internet applications with Nokia networks Asia Pacific. This is expected to increase to 200 billion SMS messages per month by the end of this year, he told a forum at Communicasia, the region's largest telecom trade fair. One telecom operator in the Philippines, a global SMS leader, processed 114 million text messages just on February 14, Valentine's Day, he said. In January, opponents of then president Joseph Estrada mobilized hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to the streets in part by sending SMS messages, forcing him to flee the presidential palace amid a swirling corruption scandal. While the increased usage in Asia has been phenomenal, there is still room for growth because SMS messages are mainly using the English language, said Dinesh Singh Bhatia, chief executive of Singapore-based Edgematrix Pte. Ltd. There is a huge untapped market using other languages with their own characters such as those of China, India and Thailand. "I think SMS has barely begun to takeoff," Bhatia told AFP on the sides of the trade fair. "The growth rate has been phenomenal, but only with Roman characters. "There's a lot more diversity in Asia. There is the Chinese language, the Indian language," he said, adding that the Japanese were more of a recipient of messages rather than senders because of the language barrier. "So I think SMS has a long, long way to go. Voice is the killer application and I think the second killer application is going to be simple text-based messages," he said. Nokia's Halttunen said the handset maker was developing SMS-friendly mobile phones targeting the Thai and Chinese markets. SMS will hold its ground, even with the arrival of third generation (3G) mobile services, which offer faster and more complex connection options such as video conferencing, because it is simple and cheap, Bhatia said. "We as human beings are going do what's economical to us. If we need to get a message across and it costs us just five cents ... rather than calling in and seeing a video screen, I think we're going to choose the former," he said. Hoong Ngee Khoon, director for Asia-Pacific of Internet global consultancy firm Cap Gemini Ernst and Young, said SMS will become more sophisticated as higher forms of technology allowing wider bandwidth are put into place. "We are proposing SMS but more sophisticated. With messaging, we can attach pictures, documents and movies," he said in an interview. "It will be the same form of SMS but you can do bigger things because you have bigger bandwidth. And because it is more secure, we can also do transactions with SMS. "I believe SMS will stay, whether it's with GSM, 2.5G or 3G," he said. GSM is the current technology in use in mobile phones and 2.5G is the transitional technology toward 3G. He said 3G is just a platform and SMS is one of the services that could make use of that conduit. "I can send colorful roses to my wife during Valentine's Day or during her birthday, rather than just plain happy birthday," he said.