Hong Kong - Phone users in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are Asia's most enthusiastic senders of text messages, according to a survey released Thursday.

More than 97 per cent of mobile phone users in Singapore have sent text messages in the past month, followed by 96 per cent of people in Kuala Lumpur and 94 per cent of people in Seoul, the survey found.

More than 87 per cent of people in Melbourne and Sydney said they had sent texts in the past month while the region's lowest rate of text messaging were recorded by Hong Kong (85 per cent) and Bangkok (69 per cent).

The survey was conducted by the market research company Synovate, which studied the habits of more than 5,000 mobile phone users in seven Asian-Pacific markets.

Hong Kong people ranked as the most likely to use high-tech video-messaging functions on their mobile phones, however, with 31 per cent of respondents saying they had sent or received video messages in the past month.

That figure compared with 23 per cent of people in Kuala Lumpur, 18 per cent of Singaporeans, and 4 per cent of people in Melbourne and Sydney.

People in Taipei were the most likely to use their mobile phones to play games with 59 per cent of respondents doing so in the past month, followed by people in Seoul (56 per cent) and Singapore (53 per cent). (dpa)