New figures show Irish people are slowly abandoning text messages.

Data from the Communications Regulator shows a fall of 27 per cent in the number of texts sent by Irish mobiles in 2013.

However Irish customers still sent almost 2.2 billion texts in the last three months of 2013 - the equivalent of 443 texts for every mobile phone in the country.

The ComReg report suggests texts are being slowly overtaken by messages through other apps: in the last quarter of 2013 mobile users downloaded enough to load the Facebook homepage almost 10 BILLION times.