Airtel has rolled out its ‘SMS2.0’ service, which is touted as the world's first upgrade to SMS.

The launch of SMS2.0 has made ‘Airtel’ first in India to unveil this innovative service to its 55 million customers.

Powered by Affle, the new service ‘SMS2.0’ allows users to discover a host of relevant content services together with better messaging features.

Affle is the biggest mobile media company, which presently operates out of India, Singapore, Thailand, UK, and USA.

SMS2.0 is distinctive as it has leveraged the SMS popularity, and has congregated messaging, content, and contextual advertising into single application that will reside as the default SMS application on the mobile phone of the customer.

SMS2.0 is a free upgrade to the regular SMS application. There will be no change in SMS charges. The Airtel users simply send ‘SMS2’ to 543210 to download SMS2.0 service.

SMS2.0’s message personalization options contain additional features like composing & sending messages with various text & background colors and attractive emoticons.

The content experience is driven around leveraging SMS, and sending user-relevant content including news, jokes, movie updates, Cricket, Astrology, etc that flawlessly structured into the messaging experience.

Anuj Kumar, executive director (South Asia) Affle, said, “India is an exciting mobile market and in Airtel we have found a great partner to take our services to users. It would redefine the messaging experience and become entry window to the world of Mobile Internet.”