iPhone's Missing Feature 10
I love my iPhone. There… I said it.
There is one problem with it (and I don’t blame Apple for it). Multimedia Messaging is pretty much non-existent with non-iPhone friends & family. My family continues to send me pictures/videos via text message… because they can with their other friends and family. I find myself looking at the following message quite often.
Then I go to AT&T’s AMAZING site…
...and I get a broken image.
Great work AT&T! Apple… this is tainting my experience with the iPhone. Make them fix it!
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Ugh. This one makes me nuts. I have missed out on so many great chances to interact with my friends and family over this one. Why is this? What is a multimedia message anyway? Couldn’t it say what the message contents are at least?
What about including the link to the site in the message? That way you could just go to the site to see the message? What if it automatically signed you in too? At least that would lower some barriers to this experience.
Have you checked to make sure they didn’t just send you a picture of an image placeholder?
I simply use email. Using MMS when you have email feels a bit to me like using WAP when you have the real internet.
If your phone is jailbroken, you could try a free program called “Swirly MMS” (http://www.swirlyspace.com/iphone/apps/mms/) that lets you send and receive MMSs on your iphone.
Like Jon G, I prefer to use email and only have that program installed for the ‘old schoolers’ that still use MMS. ;-)
Yeah, this drives me nuts … tried Swirly but I can’t get it to work properly.
Really dumb of Apple/AT&T to leave this out.
Why don’t you blame Apple for this Robby? It seems to me its completely their fault. There’s no good reason why the iPhone shouldn’t support MMS. AT&T’s failure is secondary and par for the course.
@Marc said:
For the same reason that I don’t blame Ruby on Rails for not making a lot of effort to support legacy databases. My belief is that Apple looked at the messaging capabilities of phones and said, “why not just use email? almost everybody has an email account now.” So… the downside? Incoming MMS messages have nowhere to go. AT&T should be responsible for this portion and directing messages to somewhere sane (their current implementation leaves a lot to be desired).
MMS has been unnecessarily expensive for consumers and I suspect it’ll evaporate in new phones over the next few years.
“For the same reason that I don’t blame Ruby on Rails for not making a lot of effort to support legacy databases.”
Not supporting legacy technology is one thing. MMS is hardly a legacy technology.
Or you can try MessageDance. you can share iphone pictures on your blog site (wordpress or blogger) with your friends and family.
- Take a picture send it to photos @ messagedance.com , that will go to your facebook albums
- or [yourname] @ messagedance.com that will go to your messagedance message stream and all the places you have configured your messages to go (like twitter, xanga, myspace, facebook etc)
- or blogs @ messagedance.com to make photo blog right away.
You can look at some of the sample iPhone photos on their public message stream.
yes everything is public , not sure when they planning to do private messaging though. Thought would share this with you guys.