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mms under pressure

i've noticed more and more that MMS is coming under pressure, such as articles by the always upbeat [sarcasm] Guy Kewney - which aren't without merit; their thesis being that MMS was made for P2P, and pictures sent via the MMSC which are converted to a least common denominator format will not fly in a megapixel and beyond cameraphone world.

either via the RSS feed on this site, or by going to my public flickr page you can see my tests.

a megapixel photo from a Nokia 7610 sent via Email, T-Mobile US MMSC (Ericsson brand), and a Private MMSC we own (NowSMS brand).

they get resized before getting to Flickr...and it's interesting to note that most moblogging sites are getting by just fine with email parsing instead of true MMS.

I control the config of the Private MMSC - and what i saw surprised me a little: the MMSC isn't resizing the pictures, the Nokia phone is! The MMSC didn't need to do any resizing at all, since the email client doesn't send down a limiting UAProf.
An inspection of sending an extended size from the Sony Ericsson K700i was also interesting - it wouldn't let me MMS pictures bigger than 640x480 (VGA) - the menu option is turned off!

Now i have to look at the MM1 (the protocol for sending MMS from the phone) to see if this is a standards limitation, or just a choice made by the device manufacturers to keep support headaches down (since many operators turn off image size conversion on the MMSCs - but either way, it's an interesting decision. why not allow megapixel phones to MMS megapixel images? the MMSCs can definitely handle bigger pictures - with one of my companies I'm working on a system right now that allows 5 Megapixel images to be sent to MMS phones without a problem, and the MMSC is doing the heavy lifting here.

Especially with CDMA just rolling out MMS (really) with many > 1 megapixel phones, it will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

There are a couple companies that have developed superior technology on the client that are compatible with MMSCs Cognima Snap mostly in the GSM world and dotPhoto's Pictavision mostly in the CDMA/BREW world that are much better at pushing images around from client to server on phones. these companies have been forced to be compatible with MMS systems mainly for billing reasons but the underlying technology is generally a little smarter than MMS.

a few caveats when you read this stuff:

a) it's naive to think hardware manufacturers won't upgrade MMS capabilities are more devices roll out

b) A2P MMS is still an untapped market that doesn't suffer from the problem that companies like Cognima market - sending pics and video to the phone via the MMSC is still the best way to do such things, in my opinion, because the MMSC just handles so much heavy lifting of dealing with the UAProf.