I declared previously that the 2007 holiday season would be the year of the MMS taking over. We’re all familiar with the generic, corny SMS messages that get sent about during the Holidays, and I was hoping that this year, we’d go multimedia and add pics or short video clips to the fun.
I tried, I really did. It *could* have been my phone, I’ll admit. Using my N95, I created a very simple MMS with an image of me and my fiance, with a short message. Nothing too fancy. I then proceeded to add everyone in my address book (~235, thanks to a recent cleaning) and press send, like I do with SMS. Not so fast, says the phone. I can’t send to that many recipients at once. However, I wasn’t informed as to how many I *could* send to. By trial and error, I found that I could do 5 at a time. No thanks, so I switched back to the trusty SMS to get my holiday cheer across.
I found this really disturbing, though. Why can’t I send an MMS to more than 5 people? To this point, I can understand why the iPhone doesn’t have MMS. It’s such a limited way to share media. MMS is capped at 300KB, and apparently can only be sent to a limited number of people at one time. The only reason it’s preferred over email is because the carriers count it as a message, rather than data, and thus, it’s typically cheaper for consumers.
Were you able to send MMS greetings this holiday? Did you receive any in response?
Ewan, I was on T-Mobile on my last contract (14 months ago), I used to love sending MMS then. Now I’m on Vodafone, I used to get 10 free MMS in the beginning, then they (Vodafone) stopped giving them free when the £7.50 mobile internet started. My contract is nearly up and am thinking of jumping ship to 3.
SMS is simple. Your phone can send each message to exactly one recipient at a time. Your N95 has a handy feature that gives you the illusion of being able to send one message to all your contacts; it just sits there sending out copies one at a time to each of the recipients. Nice and simple; your mobile operator bills you for each message, if you choose you get delivery reports for each part, no more complicated than sending 1 message, but your handset repeats the process for you.
Now MMS. Unfortunately this was designed by a committee of IT-types (rather than Telecoms-types) who sat around saying “Wouldn’t it be nice if….” and all sorts of rubbish got added. There are now numerous where you can choose 1 of 17 different methods for getting the same result. So when your phone submits a message to the mobile operator it can specify lots of recipients, bit like an email. This is a mandatory part of the MMS spec; so carriers MMSCs must support it. Unfortunately the MMS spec doesn’t answer all the questions that come as a result of that -> how does billing work? what if you’ve only got credit for the first 230 messages and the last 5 takes you over your credit limit? how can delivery reports be handled sensibly? So MMSC vendors pick some “sensiblish” values and limit things so that it’s not too abusable. Now your handset vendors have a problem – they can’t simply decide to act like they did with SMS, because there will be a carrier out there that charges more for two messages to different recipients rather than one message to two recipients, so unlike SMS where the handset doesn’t limit you to the limits of the SMSC with MMS it ends up having to. MMS once again screws itself over with it’s own complexity bloat. SMS is here to stay 😀