Europe UK : Fun Text (www.sendfuntext.com), the emotional messaging service provider, today announces that it has secured a deal with 3 UK for its unique handset-based messaging application to be installed on a range of 3’s device portfolio.  Under the deal, 3UK customers will be able to access Fun Text’s rich media messaging capabilities direct from the messaging menu of their phone, alongside traditional alternatives such as SMS and MMS.

Fun Text is a new mass-market mobile messaging medium that combines the richness of MMS with the ease of use of SMS.  The platform enables users to quickly and easily add rich media to their text messages for emotional expression.  Fun Text represents a new category of everyday communication in-between user-generated photo-messaging and SMS – ‘emotional messaging’ where users can deploy professionally created content within messages to clearly express emotional statements.

The Fun Text application will initially be offered as a download to 3UK customers from the Planet 3 portal.  At launch, the application will be available on the following handsets: N95, N73, E65 and 6120. Fun Text content will be actively managed to suit the time of day, the date and the season and will include videos, animations and static images.

Fun Text has previously been available as a service on the portals of several major operators but this deal marks the first time that an operator has deployed the newly-launched handset client application.  By integrating Fun Text into the heart of the phone’s messaging infrastructure and address book, the handset-based application promises to drive significant extra Fun Text traffic and become part of daily messaging for consumers.  Early trials show that Fun Text users send 50% more MMS, driving MMS traffic for network operators and leveraging existing network infrastructure investment.

James Pycock, Business Development Director at Image Semantics (ISL), the company behind Fun Text, said: “Fun Text is about giving customers the opportunity to express themselves emotionally through mobile messaging.  User generated MMS is great for sharing pictures and SMS is great for ‘functional messages’ like ‘I’ll be late for the meeting’.  By enabling people to access a range of professionally created multimedia content that can be easily inserted into a message on the handset, Fun Text opens up the emotional messaging category - letting you say ‘I really miss you’ or ‘sorry’, ‘love you’ or the millions of other deeply personal messages we send to each other every day.”