The prices in one country is not an argument. Ok I do feel stolen by the price of SMS but I know of NO person (even with full flegded smartphones) who has his IM open on their phone. Even me I rarely used IM on a phone before N900 because of poor integration. Havig fring on the background on the N95 or 5800 was a horrible battery drain, and resource hog.(off topic but that's why I believe the N900 has awesome battery life. All other smartphones I used wouldn't last a day with wifi running let alone wifi and 3G hybrid) So sms is a must if you need to text someone. Now if you are on a prepaid plan in at least two providers here MMS costs the same as SMS without the stupid 160 char limit and with the ability to send lowercase greek letters (unicode sms's have an even more stupid limit of 70 chars). And since the MMS apn got automatic in phones some years ago, everybody can receive MMS's hassle free. I rarely use them, but those few times I needed it ("hey it looks like that, do you want me to buy it") have proven really useful. Until e-mail configuration becomes one click and data plans on phones less of a rip-off, (and until MMS get phased out on the whole industry) they are still useful.
I won't cry over a missing feature since there is an app for it. I bought a smartphone so I can add any software related missing feature with an app, but I think that saying it's useless is fanboyism. If it was there it would be standard and we would be all laughing about how incompetent apple is to have left it out. Anyway I really hope to see printing instead of native mms, I printed out a note off a E52 on my network lexmark laser and I was stunned with the simplicity of the solution, as much as I felt intimidated that a tiny phone was able to do what my 180gr linux computer isn't.
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SMS and MMS are BOTH out of line with the direction which towards generic IP transported data.

I think the decision to leave out MMS and then allow it to still work but through an add on and not feel integrated was because at least some people at Nokia would prefer MMS goes away quietly.

The whole charging system for MMS is complex and unweildly all to allow the receiver free data while generally the sender pays much much more than the double charge needed to support the free data for the receiver.

The whole system is more a problem for the extra network prootocols for the network gear (than Nokia provides) than for It is more the n900.

I think that overall the mobile world would have an easier life if some of the pre-ip ideas like MMS die out,

If I send via email or IM any IP connection can be used, and even when the mobile infrastructure is used it is all much cleaner.

Even if Nokia would like it to die, there is still not a clean replacement as I may know the mobile number but not the email or IM. Until there is a cleaner system for the alternatives the death of MMS will be slow.

Look I am not going to get into the debate why or why not we need it. I hear people say oh we can email a picture or share it online with a service and thats all good.Or the other argument that its old technology. But the bottom line is not everyone out there are phone geeks that use the high tech information swap. I love mms its simple and easy for everyone to use . If my 60 yo dad is at the lake fishing with his flip phone and catches a fish and takes a picture , I would enjoy being able to recieve a picture from him just like other people in my family does at that moment. EX: take picture of fish choose phone numbers press send then receive notification on my end picture available . Thats all simple techcnology that lots and lots of people still use. So please stop with the excuses that people dont use this anymore because they do and they will continue to use it. It will not go away and we have to understand not everyone wants to use a data package to send a simple picture. And the n900 is an internet tablet with a phone app installed. hmm . Its a phone that has very unique features and capabilities. When i sit my n900 down people dont say oh thats a very nice internet tablet they say that its a nice phone and I love the features that it has. So I say bring a simple way to do MMS to the N900. and if you dont want to use the feature then dont . But if you are like me and a lot of other folks then it will be a plus.

There IS a simple way to do MMS with n900. It's called 'fMMS' and it's getting better every day.

The huge advantage this has over anything that Nokia could have done (aside from Fral's brilliance) is that the community have been able to share in the task of suggesting things, testing it, watching it grow and develop. No hanging around to see if it 'might' be in the next update - whenever that's going to to happen.

FMMS may not be integrated in exactly the way you want and it may never be entirely, because of the maemo architecture (it simply can't have two APNs active at once - though switching is now automatic) but it's a hugely powerful and simple way of sending and receiving MMS, which is what you are asking for.

i love that excuse makes me smile to and helps me sleep at night but its because the phone was rushed to meet there launch dates and the reason why it was not added after so long and being greatly requested is because nokia is to lazy should have picked a better company mate like google next time google before you buy don't come to places lke this where most act like nokia sales reps and omit the phones flaws for u to get a nokia product

superg05, you seem to be short of punctuation marks. Here you go:
.........,,,,,

Don't say I never gave you anything!

What I really love about fMMS is that it allowed me to finally "get it" on how MMS works. Very interesting stuff :-)

Why MMS?

This: By 2008 worldwide MMS usage level had passed 1.3 billion active users (source Tomi Ahonen Almanac 2009) who generated 50 billion MMS messages (source Abi Research 2008) and produced annual revenues of 26 billion dollars annually (source Portio 2009)

It makes operators money - in addition to the convenience of sending a picture directly to a phone without requiring the recipient to go to email or a picture site.

Now, T-Mobile in the US can't get its act together enough to allow me MMS to Vodafone in Ireland, but, other than that, I find fMMS handles my MMS requirements just fine.

Why is everyone complaining about having to switch to the MMS APN in order to download their incoming (and send out their outgoing) MMS's?

Just keep your N900 on the MMS connection at all times. At least for T-Mo US, that works fine for data as well. I haven't used the "regular" APN in ages. I have my N900 to automatically connect to the MMS APN when it loses my home WiFi connection as I leave my house.

Wrong.

The word "tablet" is nowhere on Nokias
product page. Infact, the heading is "The Nokia N900 Mobile Phone".

And if the lack of the word tablet there doesn't spell it out for you, let me point to what Nokias own stance on the issue is; calling it Internet Tablet is "not an option".

The N900 is a Mobile Phone, source Nokia, and it's an Mobile Computer, source Nokia, but it's not an Internet Tablet, source Nokia.