People from all over Wales went head-to-head to find out if they were the fastest texters in the west at a mobile phone competition.

Competitors - young rather than old - flocked to Cardiff to enter the Welsh heats of a national competition to find the person who could send a text message in the shortest amount of time.

Jolene Cox is Welsh champion texter

High-street chain Phones 4U hosted 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.

This is the third of eight regional finals in the National Texting Championships - winners will go to London for the finals in October.

The Welsh entrant will be Jolene Cox, who has been perfecting her technique since receiving a mobile phone for Christmas a few years ago.

"The texting was free then - I was texting all the time, and it just carried on from then," she explained.

Her top tips to improve performance on the handset were to keep nails short and abbreviate all words by removing vowels.

The sender should also concentrate on what they are doing so their message will be clear when it arrives.

Text referee for the event, James Taylor, said he considered speed to be the most important thing.

However he admitted: "I'm no good at texting myself, so I couldn't tell you how to text properly."