The festive season in 2008 was a record one for Orange, with more than 100 million text messages being sent on Christmas day. On top of that over 1 million picture messages were sent by customers on the same day.

Orange said that expected a 10% increase in picture messages to approx 1.1 million being sent this Christmas, giving quite a good indication of growth rates for MMS in general I think.

New Year’s Eve is just as popular with an expected 120 million text messages likely to be sent, compared to 106 million last year and 1 million picture messages.

[Via Mobile Marketing Magazine]

Orange UK customers can now upload their pictures to their Twitter stream by simply sending them to 86444.

The service is run through a photo site called Snapshot which is run by Orange, and it all works pretty seemlessly too. I tried it out today and you just send your first MMS and get a SMS back which links you to a Twitter authorisation page.

After you fill in your username and password you’re ready to go. Orange send you an SMS confirmation with the link to your picture after every upload.

I know sites like TwitPic already have MMS functionality but the way it works on Orange with its SMS confirmations is quite nice.

[Via Techcrunch]

A couple of weeks back I wrote about the fantastic Orange ‘Good Things Should Never End‘ website and how much fun it was to play around with. Well it turns out their agency Poke Fallon (in conjuction with Unit 9) has managed to go one better with the bloody brilliant Friend-O-Meter.

Friend-O-Meter utilises the information available on your Facebook, Twitter or Myspace accounts to quiz you on your friends. The multiple choice questions range from ‘What percentage of male to female friends do you have?’ or ‘Who’s birthday is it in October?’. Pictures also appear asking you to match the face to the friend.

Oh and to top it off, the person with the quickest and most accurate answers wins a Motorola DEXT and the title of ‘Best Friend In The UK’.

There are also nice little touches like the break dancing robot and being able to update your status with your score (encouraging others to get involved).

The site is promoting the new Motorola DEXT, the first Android phone from a major manufacturer. DEXT comes with a feature called MOTORBLUR which basically aggregates all your social networking sites into live home screen widgets. Try the simulator here.

This site ties in perfectly with what the Motorola DEXT is all about and also with the Orange ‘Together we can do more’ message.

Just goes to show you the variety of data that you can pull out of Facebook, Twitter and Myspace to make campaigns have that personal touch. It’s what makes the quiz so engaging to the point where I’ve already spent an hour trying to go up the rankings.

So to recapped Fun+Social Networks+Prizes = Greatness.

Make sure you head over and try it now. Let me know if you beat myscore of 93.6% booya!

Over the next 18 months Orange will be launching a range of ‘future phones’ which showcase new innovation in technology. The first up is the LG touch screen watch phone.

It features 3G, video calling, a touchscreen and the ability to compose text messages by only viewing one word at a time on the tiny screen.

The limited edition phone will go on sale from 9:00am on the 27th August in the Orange Shop, Bond Street Station, London at the hefty price tag of £500.

Check out the video below for a preview.

The widget works on Windows Vista, Mac, iGoogle and even Facebook. There are currently 619 active users for the widget on Facebook.

It doesn’t seem to be actively promoted or available for contract customers, not sure why but it’s defo a useful tool.