Avatars are becoming pretty standard on IM clients these days, so why not on mobile text messages as well? Finnish startup Comeks, which is backed by Accel Partners and works with Swisscom, recently launched a beta for Comeks Shorts. It turns your plain-text SMS messages into cute characters talking in comic balloons. Both parties have to have the software downloaded to their phone for this to work, otherwise it just comes out as a normal text message. But the spread of these sorts of avatars to mobile applications just seems inevitable (see Meez, which does the same thing for ring tones).

Comek’s mobile app supports a long list of cell phones. Unfortunately, my Blackberry is not one of them.