A mobile phone allows most, text messages, possibly combined with multimedia content, to send.

The Short Message Service (SMS) enables short text messages with a length up to 160 characters. The first short message was in December 1992 from a PC to a mobile phone in the UK Vodafone network. For the text, the name SMS established, although the abbreviation SMS really only refers to the carrier service.

Originally conceived as a pure "waste product" for free, SMS has developed to the main income for the bearer network. In 2003, in Europe over 16 billion text messages sent per month. However, a thorough look at the surprising success of this service not because it is in combination with a cell phone very much fit for purpose to use as his now almost-forgotten predecessor, the digital alarm radio receiver (so-called "Pager").

For deaf and hard of highly offers the "SMS" function, a possibility to use a mobile phone, as well as the picture phone and text phone.

Development of SMS exist under the name Enhanced Message Service (EMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). MMS offers the possibility of using a mobile phone multimedia messages (videos, images, sound and text) of up to 500 KB meanwhile to other mobile devices to send. MMS is not compatible with SMS and EMS, MMS terminals must explicitly support. Some operators offer otherwise retrieving the MMS via the Internet and a password that the recipient is notified via SMS on.