A few weeks ago Nokia launched the Asha 210, a striking QWERTY phone with the world’s first dedicated WhatsApp button. 

A few days afterwards, by sheer coincidence, a report was released that said instant messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, had overtaken SMS for the first time ever.

According to the market research firm, Informa, 19 billion messages were sent per day on chat apps in 2012, compared with 17.6 billion SMS texts.

The gap is set to grow even wider. By the end of this year, Informa estimates that around 41 billion daily messages will be sent by chat apps, compared to an average of 19.5 billion SMS messages every day.

In an interview recently, Jan Koum, the CEO of WhatsApp revealed that his service was more popular than Twitter’s 200 million active users.

Nokia were definitely onto something by putting the WhatsApp button on the Asha 210!

Get the message

It’s not just WhatsApp either. No matter which Nokia device you have, there’s a wide choice of messaging apps available to you. There’s LINE, eBuddy, Kik Messenger and chatting on Facebook is very popular too.

Not withstanding the fact that on Lumia smartphones you can chat with your friends through the Me Tile.

With all this in mind, it’s easy to see why chat apps have overtaken SMS, but what about you? Do you find yourself using chat apps more often sending a SMS message?

We’ve set up an informal poll to see which one is more popular among Conversations readers.

As well as voting you can also tell us why you prefer using SMS or chat apps in the comments below.