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From a Telco's perspective, SMS must be a real money-spinner -- you get paid up to 20 cents for moving just a small handful of bytes from one phone to another.

In fact, if you assume that the average SMS message is probably just 50 bytes or less, that 20 cent price tag comes to a massive $4,000 per megabyte. Boy, that makes Telecom's over-cap DSL rates look like a bargain doesn't it?

What's even better is that SMS isn't a realtime product. There's no guarantee that your SMS message will be delivered within a second, a minute or even an hour. This allows Telcos to simply queue SMS messages when the network gets really busy, delivering them as and when gaps appear in the flow of voice traffic.

Perhaps now we can see why Telecom mobile is able to offer a $10/month flat-rate texting service and why, in Australia, Vodafone recently changed their voice-call charging structure so that very short voice calls are no longer cheaper than SMS messages.

But SMS remains a very convenient way to communicate with people and its non-realtime characteristics are sometimes an asset. Like email, you can send an SMS happy in the knowledge that even if the recipient has their phone turned off or is otherwise occupied, the message will eventually be read.

However, when I was in the USA earlier this year I saw something that might just go a long way towards replacing the SMS service.

To understand why this new service might be a winner you have to consider the single biggest drawback to SMS: thumb-stress!

Let's face it -- keying out an SMS of any significant value using your thumb is a slow and tedious process even if you are a one-fingered-wonder.

The SMS-killer may well be something as simple as a version of voice-mail.

Instead of growing callouses on your thumb by bashing away at those tiny little buttons, you simply select the number you wish to communicate with, hold down the talk button and -- well -- talk!

At the recipient's end, an alert (like the SMS alert) sounds and they simply hit a key to start listening. The volume on the phones I saw could be turned up to the point where you didn't need to hold the phone to your ear in this mode.

Do you remember the old walkie-talkies or CB Radios of the 1970's?

Well that's just how this system works -- press to talk, release to listen.

Let's look at the benefits of this CB-radio mode of operation:

Firstly, if the party being called isn't available or their phone is turned off, the sender's message can be stored and delivered as soon as the phone comes online again and is free -- just like an SMS.

Secondly, this service only uses half the bandwidth because only one party is able to talk at a time.

Thirdly, it's not really realtime - just close to it. This means that CB-radio-mode packets can be given a lower-priority than full voice calls and that allows a lot more work to be squeezed out existing bandwidth.

But for people like me, the biggest bonus has to be that I don't have to spend half an hour thumbing out a short message in broken English on a keyboard the size of a grain of rice.

From a billing perspective -- you can be charged only for the amount of time you spend holding down the talk button -- so in a conversation, the person who talks the longest pays the most and in most cases the cost of a call will be shared by both parties.

If you don't want to share the cost of a call with someone you don't know or don't like -- just ignore their call alert and it doesn't cost you a penny.

If/when such an innovation appears here in NZ, would you find it more convenient than SMS?

Where was Friday's Aardvark?
Don't ask! Friday was a total disaster on numerous fronts but fear not, things appear to have returned to some semblance of order once again.

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