Despite its technological timeliness and enormous potential market size, the Mobile Messaging industry has yet to be realized in any meaningful way.
Numerous vendors claim to have some sort of Mobile Messaging product and service in place. Since most wireless networks have already converged towards IP, it is often fairly easy to get short messages to users over wireless networks, using simple custom protocols. These various systems all claim to be open; however, none of them work together, and they cannot make use of each other's assets. The result of this is that the Mobile Messaging arena is populated by various closed, non-interoperating products and services, and is currently dominated by a relatively small number of closed systems. None of these closed systems has a long-term future.
Most Mobile Messaging services are built on existing infrastructures and capabilities, and are available through paging and cellular phone companies as an extension of current services. However, building wireless messaging capability with protocols such as ReFLEX and IS-136 is at best a stopgap measure, because of the inherent size and structure limitations of those protocols. Moreover, these protocols are not IP based, and cannot benefit fully from the coming IP convergence.
Research In Motion (RIM; www.rim.net) has created an excellent, though closed, Mobile Messaging solution with its Blackberry(tm) mobile e-mail system. While RIM is currently leading the industry with its combined product and service offering, other manufacturers and service providers are moving quickly to catch up.