Last year, Britons sent an average of 265 million text and 1.6 million picture messages every day, figures released by the Mobile Data Association revealed.

For the whole 2009, the figure stood at 96.8 billion text and 600 million picture messages.

The Christmas day reported further jump in the number of mobile messages. On the Christmas day Britons sent 874 million texts and 4.5 million picture messages.

Commenting on the topic, Mobile Data Association’s chairman Steve Reynolds said, "There remains a significant and still developing role for text messaging.”

He also added that people are using SMS in spite of availability of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter because of its simplicity.

Earlier in 2008, Britons had sent a total of 78.9 billion text messages and 553 million MMS.