maybe this is why i'm not getting it.

i do expect miracles and instant fixes. unlike the community developers, nokia has all the knowledge about MMS. they've implemented it over and over again. they know the theory (what's in the specs), they know what works in real life (quirks with carrier implementations - worldwide!), they have existing source code.

but it's good to read here that my above assumptions aren't valid for everyone and that people would love working on MMS just for the fun of it, no matter what Nokia does meanwhile. I must have underestimated this community... yet again.

Not the same in France (as usual...). Well, for 2 operators at least they don't have the same APN. And the point is that right now, you can only define one APN in Maemo5, at least in the release I've got.

Right - are you using a later SW version than the guy at my-symbian? If you can disclose this information of course. He seems to be using 2009.34-15 as seen here.

Otherwise we just got another obstacle to pass

heh, since my isp stopped trying to count wap traffic and other net traffic separately, i had forgotten about the insanity that is gateway and apn...

quick guess here is that they send the initial special sms (some very old phones will show it in the usual sms inbox, i have seen it myself), then if its not reacted to within some timeframe, a normal sms will be sendt, pointing the user towards a telco run web page where the mms can be accessed...

The way I understood it, the first message asks the phone what capabilities it has, but I assume there is some kind of timeout for that response as well as you said tso.

Added the problem with only one APN available in Fremantle atm to the wiki; http://wiki.maemo.org/MMS_implementation

Given the data received from sender is merely a MIME encoded SMS pointing to URI to download message if you have the same APN all you have to do [as proof of concept] is decode the SMS and download the data from the URI. URI can be WAP 2.1 or HTTP. Then you need to decode that data. For convenience all of this must be automated for end-users, and a second PPP connection must be made only if APN are not same IOW this should be checked. I'm not sure most providers require a seperate APN. I find this a bold statement which requires a lot of recent experience with many international telcos while this might very well be a legacy statement.

If providers have a list of smartphones which supposedly support MMS then this might destroy the opportunity for community-supported MMS.

Indeed Nokia has the inside knowledge of MMS support, but those who implemented it in S60 did this long time ago and are not from Maemo dept. I think if Nokia would do it then need to implement full WAP because sometimes WAP is required instead of HTTP and they can't implement a half-working WAP since they have to respect standards. If community supports MMS it may or may not work completely, and it may or may not completely respect respect standards but if Nokia does it they have to completely respect standards.

The whole Brainstorm entry is about whether Nokia or community would do it, but I don't think this proposition is the only question to be asked. IMO the question should be where the priority of minimal support lies to make most users be able to use Nokia N900 as their phone. My answer to that is: a community project to provide support to receive and read a MMS. As quickly as possible. If 5% of providers need seperate APN I don't find such support very important, while if 95% of providers need seperate APN I do find that important. Also, is it possible to embed MicroB? Then you could use the WAP plugin to download the MMS.

Would sending MMS not be the biggest priority? Most telco send a txt msg with a link to a web page where an MMS picture can be viewed/downloaded. This is a simple task on a phone with a high quality browser such as the N900.

However on a dumb phone with little or no browser viewing an email isnt possible whereas MMS msgs work well. So would the main use case for MMS msgs not be sending pictures to dumb phones or people who dont check email/social networking sites often/not at all?

Just my 2c.

Just to clarify the "only one APN problem": nothing forbids the MMS application to open its own apn. It's a simple AT command to initialize the modem. However, I haven't tested if the N900 can open 2 PDP contexts at the same time.
If this is not the case, it means you cannot retrieve the MMS while already connected to the internet (as long as you need to use 2 separate apns).

and that sounds to me what the nokia people where talking about, that the kernel could not handle multiple connections at the same time, or something...