Carriers and ISPs are looking for sticky applications to deal with churn but are still stuck on pushing more down the pipe rather than taking a more intelligent approach to content. Three major device competitors ? Blackberry, Nokia and Motorola all have different shticks as the expression goes. At last fall's CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment show in San Francisco, Nokia featured a number of partners including the usual practical business applications and fun ones like games on the phone such as Heroes and Miami CSI.

The most encouraging news for smart Email-to-SMS vendors like Amika Mobile is the openness of a number of players to SMS despite the big lag in North America in SMS compared with India and Europe. Remember that India is selling 100,000 phones a day and mostly for SMS! The good thing here is that users are forcing the carriers and device manufacturers that do not want to embrace SMS to do so. It reminds me of the ancient ATM versus IP debate and we all know how that story played out with carriers initially missing the Internet wave altogether! Hopefully, history will not repeat itself in this situation and the North America carriers will open their minds to more than Smart Phone messaging and embrace SMS as the 2.5 Billion mobile phones in use in the world today eclipse the 30 Million Smart Phones (PDAs) of today by a long shot!