Cupid in the mobile age

Telstra is predicting more than 8 million SMS' will be sent on its network on Valentines Day, up from 5.7 million sent on Valentine's Day last year. Vodafone is also expecting a hefty 30 percent increase to more than 3 million SMS's sent over its network.

"Keep your messages romantic but refrain from writing anything too intimate -- you wouldn't want your girlfriend's mother reading it inadvertently," Dally-Watkins said. "It is also important to remember that you can't disguise the telephone number of the phone that sends the text message, making an SMS from a secret admirer virtually impossible."

The surge in mobile courting is expected to carry over into multimedia messages, with budding Lothario's sending images to enhance their chances of gaining that special date. Hopefully they'll remember MMS' can be forwarded. Telstra expect 20,000 photos to be sent via picture messaging on Valentine's Day, accompanied by tunes such as "When a man loves a woman".

Mobiles are becoming an essential tool in the courtship rituals of modern Australians, with 27 percent of Australian men and 18 percent of Australian woman calling or messaging their beloveds several times a day, according to a recent study conducted by Siemens.

The survey also found that 47 percent of Australian women and 31 percent of Australian men saved SMS's classed as "the most cherished".

Three percent of Australians reported relying on fate to set them up by deliberately sending messages to wrong numbers in the hope of finding someone interesting. In India, 24 percent of mobile users reported using "wrong number SMS" to find a date.