Having a high tech camera-phone is fun, but I haven’t had much success actually sending my bad low quality photos to other people. MMS does not seem to be implemented in any standard way from one carrier to another. This is bad. It means that you can’t really be sure your recipient is going to see your message correctly, and to even get it to them at all you have to know both what company they use and how that company’s phones handle incoming pictures messages. All phones that can handle picture messages also do email, but all mobile carriers charge different rates for email than they do MMS. So you can’t reliably send a picture message to an off-network phone, and if you want to email it to them instead the price of that email won’t be included in your picture rate. Plus there’s the problem that you have no way to know if the recipient has configured email on his phone anyway.
I did a quick sweep across the various mobile providers’ websites to drag up some information on why my picture messages always bounce back, and here’s what I found:
T-Mobile
I have T-Mobile, but I’ve been unable to send photos to Gabe even though he does, too. My guess is that you have to send pictures to their T-Mobile email address and not just to their phone number. T-Mobile’s email format is: 5551234567@tmomail.net. Their website has very little information about picture messaging, and doesn’t mention compatibility with other service providers.
Verizon Wireless
Verizon’s website says that its phones cannot send pictures to non-Verizon phones. I’m not sure that this is true in practice, but it would surely work using standard email if their MMS format fails. I wasn’t able to send a picture to Chris White using his phone number, so again I suspect that if it works at all messages have to go to their Verizon email address: 5551234567@vzpix.com or possibly 5551234567@vzwpix.com.
AT&T Wireless
AT&T’s website makes no mention of compatibility with other networks. It says that messages can just be sent to an AT&T Wireless 10-digit phone number, but doesn’t say if off-network pictures should go to the phone number or to an email address, nor does it provide a format for such an address.
Cingular
Cingular’s site does say that picture messages can go to other networks’ phones, but disclaims compatibility. It also doesn’t mention if it prefers 10-digit numbers or email addresses.
Sprint PCS
Sprint PCS Vision sends pictures as images embedded in HTML, so I’m guessing that most non-Sprint PCS phones have very little chance of getting the picture.
The problem with all of this is the compatibility snags harm the technology, but no provider has a great need for standardization. They’d all prefer you just get all of your friends on their network where interoperability can be assured and bandwidth costs are low. And since corporations tend to pick one service provider and stick with it, the cash cow professional market has very little sway in pushing for standards adoption.
The good news is that posting to webpages from cell phones is very easy. TypePad is doing great things in this field (though the term “moblogging” has to go), as is Text America. Of course, for the moment all that means is that it’s really easy to post crappy, grainy pictures to your website (here’s mine!), but it’s good to set up the infrastructure before camera-phone technology matures.