The US National Texting Champion is announced today

Are you a quick texter?

I am, if it’s a Blackberry QWERTY keyboard. But on any other device, I’m just a bit better than an 86 year old grandmother who’s never ever touched a mobile phone before.

So I didn’t enter the LG texting championships.

The prize is a whopping $50k for the winner. LG have been sponsoring this for three years now and if you’re wondering what’s involved in today’s final, here are the details:

During the competition, players will compete in various challenges while typing in phrases on their LG handsets exactly as they appear on nearby LG plasma screens with no typos or abbreviations, trying to be quicker than their opponents. The competition starts off with 22 contestants who will go through a “Text Attack” round, resulting in 6 contestants that will endure the various challenges to try survive each ensuing round of texting play. The three top contestants will compete in a final qualifying round, resulting in two contestants who will fight to be crowned the LG U.S. National Texting Champion in the traditional style of the competition, a speed tournament.

Riiight.

The 2007 winner, 13-year-old Morgan Pozgar, won by typing this sentence:

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocios! Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. If you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious,”

That would kill your fingers on a T9 device.

And last year’s winner, 20-year-old Nathan Schwartz, took home the title after knocking this one out in the quickest time:

“Does everybody here know the alphabet? Let’s text. Here it goes… AbcDeFghiJKlmNoPQrStuvWXy & Z! Now I know my A-B-C’s, next time won’t you text with me?”

All the details are at http://www.lgtexter.com/…

PS, LG — it ain’t cool to keep producing really swish handsets with bollocks proprietary bollocks operating systems that offer zero augmentation or enhancement whatsoever.