LONDON: "Hppy bthdy txt" went the gleeful message on Tuesday, as SMS, short messaging service or mobile phone texting marked its 10th birthday (December 3) with sections of a proud and doting UK hailing the "British idea that changed lives" around the world.

The texting explosion has surged across India and other parts of the world, leading to an estimated 250 billion messages last year and a whole new way of riting English with its GR8s, B4s, Rs, Us and generally trunk8ed spellings.

To the dismay of linguistic purists, mobile phone industry pundits say that this will remain the future, at least till 2010, because text messaging scores over landlines, mobile telephony, emailing and PC instant messaging for its four Cs: cheapness, convenience, coverage, conciseness.

But it did not look that way to start with.

The world''s first mobile text message was an entirely naff "Merry Christmas" keyed in by engineer Neil Papworth of the British technology company Sema to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis in Newbury, southern England.

It was an overly premature seasonal salutation, some three weeks ahead of festivities. Like other eccentric new ways of doing things, it was also allegedly the right idea at the wrong time. No one even noticed and texting remained the preserve of geeks and a tool for telephone engineers.

Vodafone''s TeleNotes service, as it was then called, was meant to be for businesses.

No one had imagined it could lead to the sort of constant communication, text poetry competitions, advertising and even church services that have now become common with the start of the Lord''s prayer re-written as a text message: dad@hvn, 4giv r sins

For seven years, say pundits, it remained good to talk or even email, but not combine the two in the way Papworth had done. According to one leading UK mobile phone company, the thinking was, why would anyone want to key in a message when they could simply speak?

Then in 1999, rival mobile phone networks started to allow customers to swap SMS. Mobile phones also became pay-as-you-go or with pre-paid vouchers that allowed younger, low-income users to become part of the next generation of communication technology.

SMS took off. According to trade organisation Mobile Data Association, it was a texting explosion that now translates into just about a quarter of all mobile phone users worldwide using SMS more than once a day.