The mobile phone has become a large part of people’s lives, especially when it comes to text messaging, as a recent report conducted by the Mobile Data Association shows that in the United Kingdom roughly 11 million texts are sent per hour.

According to an article over on t3, the UK hit around 265 million texts and 1.6milltion picture messages per day during 2009, which equates for the whole of 2009 as 96.8 billion texts and 600 million picture messages.

The figures show that there is a steady increase in sending text and picture messages in the UK when compared with 78.9 billion in 2008 and 56.9 billion in 2007.

As for Christmas Day, there were 4.5 million texts messages send from mobile phones in the UK, and some of the rise in text messaging has been put down to phone text voting for such programs as the X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing.