MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

The iPhone has only just recently had MMS functionality added. There are a number of threads on here about (the lack of) MMS on the N900.

I'm not trying to provoke an argument or flame war, but I'm genuinely curious to know how many people have MMS on the 'must have' side of the spec comparison sheet?

For me personally, it's totally irrelevant. I think I've sent 2 MMS messages since I got my first contract handset, a Nokia 7110, and one of those was just a 'see if it actually works' test message.

So, enlighten me. Is there something that makes MMS the killer app for you, as opposed to just using your N900/iPhone/Android device to send a regular e-mail or text message?

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Many carriers offer a number of MMS messages for free (say, 100 a month) on certain plans. If it's not free, it's cheap ($5 for 200 or something). This is a cheap, efficient way for people to upload photos to online services like flickr, facebook etc, (which all accept MMS) without having to buy a data plan.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I received 2 or 3 and sent 0 MMS messages since 2002 / 2003?

So yeah, I don't care. :D

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I never sent one.

Is it not a problem that you have to know that the recipient has an MMS phone?

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I've never sent one but received quite a few.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I actually use MMS quite a lot. Even though I'd be fine sending emails instead, I've got a few close friends who either don't have data plans on their phones or rarely have signals adequate to use a data plan (one in particular lives out on a canal boat - so an mms can appear after a few moments of being in a small signal area without having to consciously monitor the phone - whereas trying to use a data connection on a very rubbish signal can be infuriating - especially on old phones that don't actively support email).

I also find that most data plans include MMS or if they don't, they can be taken out of the numbers of SMS in the plan (here in the UK anyway), so mms is easily accessible, whereas a data plan would be added cost for very little benefit (to these people with bad signals or old phones etc). Therefore I find them very very useful to communicate with these people - and it's not always for pictures - sometimes its useful to use an mms like an awfully big sms message (or email - but receivable by those people that you'd rather not have to teach how to configure emails on a phone etc).

I'm sure there are other reasons I use it too - but I'm falling to sleep now, so hopefully you get the picture! Or not if you can't get mms ... get it? :o) - oh dear, it's been a long day.

I'm not sure if that helps put its use into a more understandable scope or not, but I definitely do find it very useful - but I would also love to not find it useful. Emails would be great and I'm all set for receiving them - I just seem to know so many people that don't send them - not from mobile phones anyway! For these reasons alone, I would love to have MMS capabilities on the likes of the N900.

Sorry to go on a bit there!

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Isn't there web services that you can use to recieve MMS from those friends?.. I seem to remember an account I once set up called pic2phone or pic2mail or some such.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

you use mms when you want to share photos, audio or video immediately - without waiting for the other person to check their mailbox.

you use it because with many contracts its cheaper than sending the same file as mail.

you use it because every phone can receive mms, but very few can do email (or are configured to do so).

you read existing threads in this forum to find all this instead of opening a new thread.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I use it very often and hope it is included in the future.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I think we should be moving forward and away from MMS.

Reasons:

1. N900 has 5meg camera
2. MMS limits 350kb per message
3. N900 requires software to compress image down to MMS size
4. Waste of resource to develop this functionality when the N900 can take advantage of the 3G & HSPDA network to upload high quality photos, link can be sent through message or social networking sites.
5. In order to see the MMS, the other person would need an MMS compatible phone
6. Not a lot of demand for MMS nowdays to be honest, users take the photos with the camera on their phone (N900) they prefer to go home and upload it on the net (Facebook, twitter etc) rather than sending an MMS to a dozen of contacts.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I would like MMS if there wasn't a size limit on the video or the pictures as its presently configured it just sucks. I never send mms I just email, but then again I live in New York where everyone either has a Blackberry or an iPhone so getting pictures immediately is easy.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Really?
Going be a tough market for Nokia then..
Also why I think MMS should be avoided, use of email or upload to social networking sites instead.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I do need my MMS. I use a Nokia Observation Camera to get regular updates on an elderly relative and my wife and I are sending MMS back and forth throughout the day. She has a not so smart feature phone.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

MMS is important for the massive non-smartphone market and it is used a lot. So in order to operate with mass market devices N900 should also support MMS. Most of the high end phone users might have email setup on their phone and all their friends may be on FB all the time. But a lot of people in their 40ish don't do that and MMS comes as a rescue for simplicity in obtaining and sending pictures etc.. of their loved ones. Most of you will be surprised how often it is utilized around where I live.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Tried to use once. Intended recipient didn't have support for it. Eh.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

What happens when you've been sent a MMS on the N900?

AT&T had the http://viewmymessage.com service set up. What does Nokia/T-Mobile/Maemo have set up?

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Well of course its anecdotal but being that 90% of my peers are professionals here in the city either in creative or business I can literally count the number of folks I know without a data plan on one hand. I would say that its iPhone first and then blackberry bold next in popularity and so sending pictures via email is easy and immediate with all of them. A sign of the times which directly corresponds to your statement however is that I have had three different friends ask me about the N900 as I'm known as always having Nokia phones. This is the first time any of them has ever asked me about a Nokia phone in my life.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I don't use it at all but maybe from month to month I receive one or tow of them .

But some people like to use it a lot , specially older people who don't deal with computers or the internet .





Q: Isn't there any third party app or expansion to add MMS to N900 yet ?

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Hello, I'm from Italy and with Vodafone I have 100 MMS for free per day. I use MMS a lot because many people doesn't use e-mail on their phone or doesn't have a data plan to use e-mail. MMS is a quick way, and often cheap, to send and recieve a picture or a short video.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

When I received MMS messages on my very old phone with no mms support, they arrived as SMS messages with some kind of embedded url to a server at the provider's. I guess that's what MMS messages really are: A url embedded in an SMS which your phone then goes out and downloads through GPRS.

Personally I've never sent a single MMS in my life and there's no reason to believe I ever will. I send lots of pictures by other means though.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I don’t use it, but Nokia is working in phones for so long that is a bit inexcusable not to have MMS from day one.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I've never sent a MMS, but I guess this is like "I've never received a PPT file in years, but even then the ability to receive then is welcome, just in case".

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

So with the N900, is it the case that you cannot send MMS or you cannot receive one or both?

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I live in Portugal and for a couple of years MMS is free in some networks plans. I use it a lot, it's fast and we can share the moment right away.


I'am waiting for my N900 so, right now, i'm still using my N96. As you know, it also have a 5MPx camera and i never had a single problem taking a picture and sending it right away to my friends. Even if i take the picture in 5 MPx and then decide to send it through MMS it's fast and it's like sending a long SMS.


I think that Nokia will provide a firmware update soon for this problem. If you want to use e-mail for that, do it but i think that it's good to choose and it only add value to the phone and reach a wider audience.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

You cannot send MMS and you cannot natively receive MMS messages in the same way as SMS like you can with most phones.

However, most (all?) networks will, upon failing to deliver an MMS to your phone, send you an SMS with a URL you can use in a web browser to see the message. Using the browser on the n900 to do this would be easy.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

it'll all be hammered out in harmattan

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I use it fairly regularly, both my girlfriend and I work in theatre and are therefore away from each other fairly often....we use it to make each other smile with a photo...yes, we could use email, but i for one like to feel the buzz in my pocket whilst i'm rehearsing and have a sneaky peek when the director is looking the other way :D.....
It's not a dealbreaker for me because hopefully it will be coming, but if not, i have an old k800i somewhere ;)

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Thanks... but I have a serious problem with the fact that not a single one of the 300 with the device has answered this very simple question or most any other question on the boards.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Thank you everyone, some genuinely useful and informative posts.

In common with a lot of the populace of this forum, I work with, associate with and count myself as one of, those folks who would feel like they'd lost a limb if they had to use a handset with no data service available. I guess the fact that I was scratching my head to come up with a compelling use case for MMS serves to illustrate how much I'd been taking this for granted.

Who knows, maybe I should even try sending a few! But then again, MMS'ing the same picture to 6 or 7 contacts, versus one upload to Flickr...

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I rarely use MMS (cant remember last time), however I believe that it should be included. MMS is available on nearly every phone but email is not. Everyone gave Apple so much flack for it, but now that its happening with the N900, its "ok" to not have it.

Basic phone features should always be included.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

The iphone came out three years ago. Three years ago it was unacceptable not to have MMS.

Three years later, however, technology marches on....

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Ofcourse. Still, there is enough reason to support a standard still heavily in use if not only for backwards compatibility reasons.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

It was not included because then Nokia would have need to implement full WAP 2.1 specification, and because namespaces are not available in the Linux kernel Nokia uses on N900. So it'd have cost a considerable amount of time and money to implement MMS. The question then becomes, would you have wanted to wait longer for N900? I would not... YMMV...

We've looked into the alternatives to namespacing, and one person has successfully found an alternative. On networking layer this solution works in a simulated environment. This means one can make a second APN to the MMS gateway.

What is missing is:

• Patching Nokia PPPd, or using LD_PRELOAD
• Using available tools to decode MIME from SMS and grab MMS.
• Present in nice UI for the general public.
• Testing in real environments.

See the other MMS thread for more background information and technical details.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Forgive me, I did not mean to imply that it needed to be added right now. As long as MMS finds its way in there someday, thats good enough.

MMS is for the masses, I could live without it.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

What has replaced it? I could send photos via e-mail on my old Sidekick in 2000 or so.

Tech hasn't moved on... by your own admission, that's a 3+ year old expectation that the current N900 doesn't satisfy quite yet.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

That's the answer that should have been provided via official channels from day one.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

I'm asking again... what happens when you receive an MMS on the N900?

Seriously, it's not that deep of a question folks.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Have not received one, so it's deeper than you think. :p

I can only assume the speculation of a forwarded url is accurate.

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Depends on telco, and probably country.

When you sign up and put SIM in your phone some providers see that your phone supports MMS and manually toggle MMS support on. When you then toss the SIM in another phone without MMS, the phone may still be registered as MMS-capable. Other providers use IMEI and have lists of phones which support MMS.

Now, what happens? Some will send you a MIME encoded message which looks like spam. You'll see this in your SMS box. That means the 'MMS' actually got through. You can decode this message with one of the many tools available. Then you have the URL to the content, and you maybe can load it. However, there are caveats. First, this all isn't pretty in a GUI. Second, many cannot directly connect to MMSC, and will need to set up a second connection to the MMSC APN though.

Other providers will convert the MMS to an e-mail.

Maybe because it was already addressed in other MMS threads...

Re: MMS - An Answer Looking For A Question?
 

Point me to it. Nothing comes up on a search.