Yes the iPhone has a fantastic interface, the best mobile browser out there and one of the fastest growing libraries of quality software on any device, but can it do MMS? No, it can’t, at least not yet.
A lack of support for media messages on the iPhone has been one of the device’s most glaring omissions from day dot and aside from the oft bemoaned touchscreen QWERTY, it’s probably the iPhone’s biggest failing.
A story that broke late last week alleged that MacWorld Sweden had heard on solid authority that the Swedish carrier, Telia, is planning to bring a multimedia messaging service to its iPhone users. Apparently a third-party application hewn by Swedish developer, Mobispine, is currently being punted to carriers as a billable MMS solution.
Continue reading ‘Swedish developer promises carrier branded MMS for iPhone’
We are living in strange times indeed when even pohoto frames have their own mobile numbers.
The T-Mobile Cameo is a fairly ordinary-looking digital photo frame, but hidden inside that faux-leather frame lurks the guts of a mobile phone. Stick a SIM card in the back and you will be able to send pics directly to the frame using MMS or email.
The 130 x 87 mm screen can do up to 720 x 480 pixels in 262,144 colours and it can store around 500 images in GIF of JPG format. No idea if it can do animated GIFS, although that could lead to some amusing Harry Potter-esque japes. Hopefully in a couple of years we can have one that will do realtime video streaming too.
T-Mobile will be selling the Cameo via their stores and website for around £50, any day now.
You might think those naughty pictures you took of yourself in varying states of undress, wearing a skimpy outfit that can only be described as a ‘top shelf’, were strictly between you and your intended recipient when you idly sent them as an MMS. Oh how wrong you were (mwuhaahaahaa etc).
There has been a serious privacy policy heart attack going on at O2, as significant quantities of MMS messages have been published all over the web. Apparently it’s all the iPhone’s fault, as the problem affects handsets that can’t display picture messages, (which naturally includes a whole heap of other handsets too).
Continue reading ‘O2’s MMS service suspended after images published publicly on the web’
A memo is rumoured to be circulating the offices of AT&T that suggests the new 3G iPhone might finally ‘do’ MMS.
Lack of Multimedia Messaging was one of the main complaints about the origonal iPhone (that and ‘no 3G’, ‘no keyboard’ and ‘costsa bleedin fortune’) so this would seem like an obvious addition.
It’s just a rumour though, and there must have been some reason why it wasn’t included in the first place. Possibly this is down to the lack of a decent SMS tariff on many US networks. The official word at the time was basically “Just use email”which always seemed a bit of a cop out.
In the UK, of course, we are all about the SMS bundling. Come on Apple - sort it out!
A few years ago, Nike launched NikeID - a website that would let you build custom versions of Nike trainers. You could select the style, the colour scheme, some detailing and last of all a short name to be stitched on the back of your new shoe.
This proved to be popular (despite costing quite a bit over the odds) although it did hit a bit of a hiccup when some wag tried to get them to make a custom pair of Nike ‘Sweatshop’. As the saying goes, it’s all fun and games until someone accuses you of unethical business practice via satirical footwear.
Anyway, things have moved on and Nike has updated the service to allow the use of MMS messages as input into the colour selection bit.
It’s a bit like that paint advert where people take random coloured objects into B&Q to get them to mix up a custom can of gloss. If you spot a nice colour scheme (in the advert, Nike suggest using a grafitti ‘tag’ but you can choose someting less ’street’ if you prefer) just snap it with your phonecam and MMS it off to Nike. They will extract a colour scheme from the image and you can import that scheme into their trainer customiser.
Obviously, it helps if you take photos of things with a limited colour palatte to begin with, but if you have lots of spare cash and fancy a unique pair of shoes, have at it.
If your Windows Mobile smartphone’s full of pictures, videos and music tracks, what are you going to do with them? How about turn them into your own short film complete with soundtrack, special effects and narration.
TrackAxMobile is the smartphone version of a PC program letting you take your content, put it together into a ‘video mix’ including videos, photos, text, effects, soundtrack and narration, even credits, which you can then share via YouTube, Flickr and other, similar sites. Or, if you’d prefer you can save it and email or MMS the video to your mates.
It’s incredibly easy to use and with the minimum of practice you could creating your own mobile masterpieces in a matter of minutes.
If it sounds interesting, there’s a seven-day evaluation version you can try from trackAx, or you can buy it for around £15.
If you fancy yourself as a bit of a photo guru then it might interest you to know that LG is looking for people like you. The company is currently running a competition called CityClickers to select ten Europeans to be official photographers for the company. To enter all you need to do is take a portrait photo of the city you live in to try and get across the essential essence and atmosphere of where you live.
So what does this have to do with mobiles? Well a couple of things, first of all the LG site set up for the competition features a clever embedded moblog section where all the entrants are posted, that means that you can submit an entry directly by MMS. The other thing is that the winners will receive a sexy LG Viewty phone complete with paid monthly bills which is pretty decent.
Utilizing a moblog as part of a competition in this way is a pretty neat idea and one that we would wager will become much more popular before long. More details about the rules etc can be found on the site but don’t hang about, entries have to be in by the 25th.
(Via CityCickers)
