This just in: Cell phone users in the States have warmed up to text messages. And boy, do we love to talk.Speaking at the annual CTIA keynote Wednesday, CTIA CEO Steve Largent told show-goers that the numbers of SMS messages sent by U.S. wireless subscribers rose to a staggering 1 trillion last year—or triple the piddling 363 billion text messages we sent in 2007.

If my math is correct, that comes out to about 3,700 text messages annually—or 10 texts a day—for every cell phone subscriber (about 270 million as of December 2008, according to the CTIA) in the States. Given that I only tap out a handful of SMS messages a week, I’ve got some catching up to do.

And here are a few more facts from the CTIA to chew on:

All told, cell chatters in the U.S. talked on their phones for a whopping 2.2 trillion minutes last year. Check me if I’m wrong, but according to my calculator, that comes out to about 4.2 million years of straight gabbing—and that’s just for 2008, mind you.
-Turns out we paid our wireless carriers handsomely for the talk-fest, to the tune of $148 billion last year.
-The average monthly cell phone bill? About $50.07 as of December 2008—up almost 30 cents from 2007, but down by $48 from 1988, when the average monthly bill was a steep $98.02.
-Finally, we’ve got (unsurprisingly) more cell sites and towers in the U.S. than ever before—a total of 242,130 at the end of 2008, according to the CTIA, compared to a mere 3,209 back in good-ole 1988. Then again, the number of wireless subscribers has increased a hundred-fold since ’88, so there’s a bit more wireless traffic nowadays.

Via Yahoo Tech