Mobile Phones and MMS

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a standard of telecommunications for sending messages which includes objects like audio, video or images. It is said to be an upgraded version of the mobile phones Short Messaging Service (SMS) which allows longer messages to be sent to one and more recipients. To view the message one needs to use the WAP browser since it contains multimedia objects.

Originally it was developed as a part of the 3GPP group (Third-Gener=ation Partnership Program) when people started realizing a 160 character message made no sense on mobile phones and something better was being proposed to be made. So 2G GSM was made to 2.5G GPRS which performed better than the former. After a lot of developments, like MIME and real multimedia support, 3 GPP joined hands with WAP standards and came up with the idea of MMS, with which one could practically send anything from pictures to audio and video files along with text as a message and keep it as long as one wanted to. The standard was then developed by Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and today we can see MMS is being used in all the corners of the world by all sorts of people on both GSM/ GPRS networks.

If your mobile phone supports the service, it is no big deal to compose a multimedia message. For uploading pictures you can use your mobile phones built camera or just like audio and video clips download it from the net, use an USB cable or use Bluetooth to transfer from any desktop or laptop and even from any other mobile phones. You can then compose your message using these multimedia objects, write a text message too if you want to and send it to one or more recipients. It might happen that the recipient's cell phone might have been switched off at that point of time but there is nothing to worry as it is delivered as soon as the mobile phone is switched on. If your recipient's phone does not support MMS facility a SMS with a default line, "You have been sent a picture message!" is sent.

CHALLENGES EXISTING WITH MMS:
# Multimedia content adaptation - Different brands of mobile phones support different multimedia content.
# Configuration - Poor configuration like improperly placed parameters in handsets often result in failed delivery of multimedia messages.
# Messages in bulk - If you send MMS' to a large number of recipients it may often fail to get delivered to all of them.

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