The competition aims to find the person with the fastest thumbs in the land with the final taking part in the middle of a boxing ring.

High-street chain Phones4U is hosting the contest which put competitors back-to-back inside a ring and set them a top-secret message to send to another phone before their opponent did.

The fastest fingers from across the UK will progress from eight regional finals and take part in the London final in October.

Glasgow's heat was taking place at the Phones4U store in Argyle Street.

Only the fastest thumbs will go through to the final

The winner of each of the eight heats taking place across the country will take home a top of the range Nokia mobile phone and will advance to the final.

Text expert Jason McLellan said he expected competition would be fierce.

Mr McLellan said it appeared to be more difficult to send text messages with the smaller mobile phones that are on the market.

Speaking on BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme he said: "They will be using their own handsets and I presume that there will be some rules in place to ensure no-one has an unfair advantage."

Last week Welsh champion texter Jolene Cox said her top tips to improve performance on the handset were to keep nails short and abbreviate all words by removing vowels.