If your hands, specifically your thumbs, experience daily pains and sores, it might be time to put away the keyboard and pick up the phone.

Texting; the form of communication through words on mobile devices. Why do we text? Its not at all faster than making a phone call, and unless your a teenager, you probably haven’t mastered your phone’s mobile keyboard yet. The CTIA’s latest figures state that American’s with cell phone sent a over  740 billion text messages in just the first half of 2009. Do the math; that 4.1 billion texts daily, about 17 texts per person with a phone.

With more texts, fewer users were actually making phone calls, dropping the average call time from 3.13 minutes in 2007 to 2.03 minutes in 2009. Don’t get us wrong though, more and more minutes are being added to calling plans, and normal phone calls still take place on a daily basis. And with all those extra texting and voice plans, your bill on rose 2% this year to a$49.57 a month… and we don’t think most people have data plans at that price!

So how much is too much? Well if we consider that some don’t text, we can’t make our number too high. And with one 14 year old Florida girl sending over 35,463 text messages in a month (1,182 per day), we can’t make it too high either. Wireless companies usually charge around $10-$15 for about 200 text messages, about 7 texts a day. But for approximately $20-$25, you can get anywhere from 1000 to unlimited from your provider. At 1000 a month, you’d be sending 33 a day, just a little too much for those who would rather call. So what’s the magic number? We’d say 500 texts per month, about 17 per day. Any less and I’d congratulate you for actually using your phone for its intentions, but anymore… and I might not ever give you my number.