Ringtones and wallpapers are on the wane with British mobile users, as consumers move to more sophisticated, multimedia handsets with cameras, according to the latest Orange Digitial Media Index, a quarterly review of the mobile content habits of its subscribers, reports theguardian.co.uk. Consumers, whose handsets are increasingly equipped with high-end camera phones are opting for their own images, rather than wallpapers. Wallpaper downloads among Orange’s 15.6 million customers averaged 100,000 images a month, an increase of a mere 3 percent. Ringtones fared even worse, falling from 14.5 percent from 117,000 to 100,000. Meanwhile, full length music tracks were making up for the short fall, with Orange customers downloading nearly 290,000 full length tracks in December alone.

Text messaging also remains popular, with an average of more than 1.3 billion text massages sent each month between November and January. Indeed, messaging surged 21 percent from the last index’s findings. New evidence, however, from global research firm TNS Global, says that the days of SMS are numbered with mobile instant messaging set to eventually replace texting. The TNS Global Telecoms Insight (GTI) study, which interviewed 17,000 respondents across 30 countries, found that once mobile users adopt MIM it overtakes other messaging tools to become the primary non-voice method of interacting. Among those who use MIM, it is the most used feature on their phone: 61 percent use it daily, compared to only 55 percent who use SMS daily and only 12 percent who use email on their mobile.