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MMS Arrives For the iPhone — Will It Crash AT&T's Network?
itwbennett writes "AT&T has said it is already seeing 'record traffic during peak hours of the night' with just the users selected for testing, and so it is 'very nervous' about the spike in traffic that it expects will occur after it launched MMS service for iPhones on Friday. Of course, setting records for MMS traffic isn't that great a feat considering that 'the service in question has been out for years on other handsets and hasn't exactly taken the mobile world by storm. In 2008, MMS made up just 2.5 percent of all messages sent from phones worldwide, meaning about 97.5 percent were SMS text messages, according to ABI Research. ABI expects the MMS share to grow to just 4.5 percent by 2014.' However, the carrier's fears in one respect may have been justified, says ABI analyst Dan Shey: 'Interoperability between carriers has always been an issue, and that's why MMS usage hasn't really taken off.'"
...it's their own damn fault. Considering how long mms has been around, and how long this has been mulled and they have had to prepare for this.
MMS Arrives For the iPhone
MMS arrived for the iphone with the release of 3.0, which happened months ago, which means most of us have had MMS for months now. it's just you american peasants who are newly getting it. headline should read, AT&T finally allows MMS on american iphones
MMS would have caught on with my friends a long time ago if it weren't so crippled by the phones that use it.
When I received an MMS on my old phone, I couldn't do anything with it but view it. I couldn't save it to my photo library, or set it as the wallpaper, forward the message, or anything, really. It was permanently attached to the SMS it came with, to either clog my inbox or be deleted. Thus, the useful functions of an MMS image are reduced to a) sending pictures of your drunk friends to other drunk friends and b) sending pictures penises to, well, anyone. With the ability of the iPhone to save an MMS photo to my photo roll, and from there send it by MMS or email to someone else, or edit it in an app, or later save it to my computer, I might actually use the MMS feature on occasion.
So, I feel that the crippled firmware of most phones is to blame for MMSes not catching on. Many of you will claim that the iPhone OS is likewise hobbled by Apple's tight controls, but if you think that the iPhone OS has it's hands tied by software/firmware, than normal phones are wrapped head to toe in duct tape, placed in cast iron sarcophaguses which are then welded shut, buried under several tons of concrete, and placed under armed guard for the rest of eternity.
Your mileage on phone OSes may vary. Prior to the iPhone, I used a Nokia flip phone that ran the default Cingular OS, whatever the hell that's called.
For that matter it'll never got popular. This is partly because operators overprice MMS and because it doesn't really serve that much purpose.
Well, there are a couple of things that you got wrong here. First, overpriced or not, unlimited MMS is included as a part of the data plan you have to buy from AT&T when you have an iPhone. So cost won't matter.
The other is that one reason MMS hasn't taken off is that it's been hard to use on a lot of phones. On some of them the user has to know to go into a different messaging task, or to say create some kind of special message, and do some weird stuff they've never done before. On the iPhone, they added a little camera icon to the left of the text entry box. Couldn't be easier.
Since the "barriers to entry" have now been substantially lowered, iPhone users will indeed start to use the feature more.
John
Well, there are a couple of things that you got wrong here. First, overpriced or not, unlimited MMS is included as a part of the data plan you have to buy from AT&T when you have an iPhone. So cost won't matter.
No, actually, it's not. It was, back when the first iPhone came out, but now you're required to get a $30 data plan that includes no SMS or MMS messages. I pay for those at the a la carte rate of $.20 and $.30 each, respectively. If I sent more than 5 a month, I might consider an Messaging plan at an additional $5 to $30 a month, depending on which plan. But it's certainly NOT included in the price of the iPhone data plan.
First, overpriced or not, unlimited MMS is included as a part of the data plan you have to buy from AT&T when you have an iPhone.
Actually the US AT&T base iPhone data plan doesn't include SMS nor MMS. For $5 you can add 200 SMS/MMS. (I'm on the family plan)
I really don't see myself using MMS all that much -- after all, I've got a full-featured mobile email client. I have some younger relatives with cheapie feature phones that occasionally send us cameraphone snaps, though, and this will beat the crap out that horrible viewmymessage.com torture we had to go through before.
Wow if cell phone networks were open like the internet, there wouldn't be these types of problems.
FLR
Agreed. Companies today don't provide a service OR a product. They supply profits. Service and products are just the ugly, messy way of moving money from the bottom to the top of the financial pyramid.
Here, iPhones can send/receive MMS just fine for a long while already [....]
Since June 17th, 2009 -- approximately 3 months ago.