AT&T to enable MMS for iPhone 3G and 3GS on Sept. 25 - Page 2

I think my favorite part about their press release is that they have a woman holding an original iPhone (which doesn't appear to be supported).

http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=1574

Same with my wife and her mother. Grandma who lives 7 hours away wants pictures of our son "text messaged" to her cellphone. MMS makes it a lot easier for my wife to do it.


That made my drink come out of my nose....

SJ came back and probably beat the person with a lead pipe who enabled MMS on the iphone and set it in motion.

I blame Apple for this as well. They stuck us with AT&T and I know at some point they were in talks to extend their agreement with AT&T even when they knew of the problems that existed with the network; and all for the mighty buck. I hope they are listening to us to now. We want a choice!!! We're tired of dropped calls and lack of 3G signals.

It is now well-accepted that Apple had no choice if it wanted to control the UI and have a carrier agree to its terms sight-unseen. Verizon told Apple to take a hike. (And, I'd rather have ATT than Sprint or T-Mobile).

I don't think AT&T deserves as much blame and ridicule as many are giving it. AT&T is certainly to blame, but considering the circumstances I think these problems would definitely occur on any other cell network in the US.

The amount of consumption from iPhone users is astronomical. I got buddies doing 2-3GB a month, I only do about 200MB because I am on WiFi most always. Before the iPhone, These folks and I were maybe using 10MB, if even that. My point is that iPhone users consume 100's times more network capacity. I don't think anyone disputes that.

Consider that AT&T's subscriber base has increased about 25% in last two years. Long-term network infrastructure planning & investment had been generally based around sub growth. However, AT&Ts sub growth might have only been 25%, but consumption probably doubled or tripled, or more due to the iPhone. Now all of a sudden, one needs a network backbone 3X as big!

I get the sense that AT&T was in denial for some time, and tried quick and dirty fixes to its burgeoning problems instead of doing some heavy investment to get ahead of the problem. I think AT&T would be more aggressive with WiFi in urban areas to offload heavy data usage, but I have also heard that AT&T has backhaul problems so that wouldn't help much anyhow.

Yes, what about the original iPhone.
If this is 3G only, I would like to be party to a suit to get all the original iPhone's unlocked.

A user can get any other phone unlocked, except for an iPhone.

Yet, they offered the ability to email photos over EDGE right off the bat. They offered web browsing over EDGE, even though web browsing often requires much more data than a single emailed photo. You don't see a disconnect here?

Hey, Sept 25th is late summer somewhere!

Seriously, why has it taken so long. There's nothing mysterious about MMS. My carrier (T-Mobile in the UK) have had it since early 2003. Is there something magic about MMS on the iPhone that has stopped AT&T from sorting it out?

It's already working on 3.1, so I guess AT&T just let us know when Apple is going to release 3.1.

Note to Apple: Do not announce a capability until your partner carriers are ready to support it within a "reasonable" timeframe. Apple controls MOST of the user experience except where the carrier needs to supply part of the function

....sounds like a F***ing alien eating a fax machine!

Me too,

Dizzy13 how do you paste an image into this post?

Ummm....lets help the folks who have already have been using MMS. The hack included tethering. If the hack is removed then tethering goes.

"It was important to give our customers a positive experience from day one," AT&T said.

Bah hah hah hah ha!!!

I told you that if enough of us called and demanded it, they would turn it on.

Well then that would be apples fault. They did not support it until this year. AT&T on the other hand has supported it on the rest of their phones all this time.

I think this was likely exactly why MMS and tethering took so long in the first place. It should have been a no brainer to include MMS, at the least, on a multimedia smart phone... the premier one at that.

It makes sense that Apple held off including it because of AT&T's whining to them that they were not ready. But with pretty much every other carrier in the world that sells the iPhone being willing and able to go live with MMS on the iPhone, I think Apple finally had enough of the snide comments from the haters about the iPhone lacking MMS and said screw AT&T, we are putting it in. They obviously put support for the carriers to enable MMS and tethering at the account level so the carriers could not support the function until they deemed they were ready...likely another concession to AT&T's inability.

I understand why Apple got in bed with AT&T to launch the iPhone. But now is the time for them to completely end any carrier exclusivity. It was necessary at first, but now the iPhone is a proven hit. Apple has no need to give exclusivity to have their requirements met. The carriers can either meet the needs or not and lose the iPhone. It is time to cut the cord to AT&T.

I am new to ATT with buying my first iPhone this summer. Overall I am content with the service, get better signal in my apt than I did with Sprint and the services work all right. Not happy about the calling plan cost, but thankfully my job gives us deals on some services including ATT, so the cost is about the same as Sprint.

But I must yell FAIL on this one!!! They said end of summer so deliver what you told your customers. If not, they should give all 3g and 3gs customers a 10% discount or something as an apology. Especally since they failed on tethering, another broken promise.

It's not like Apple called them a week before the June keynote and asked for mms and tethering, they shouldve been working on this from last year or even further back!!! This is complete bullsh@t!!! I feel like a jerk when a friend sends me an mms and I have to go to the ATT website to view the photo(s). I have to give winmo and all others users their due on this one, makes Apple look bad. I truly hope Apple gets on other carriers next year, so we can all have options.

If they don't enable tethering I would think that would be somewhat leading advertising. It should not be advertised as a feature in the US since AT&T is the only carrier and they have chosen not to implement it. If they wait for a 4G network then I would think that puts Apple in a pretty tough spot even with the disclaimers of service.

AT&T has clearly dropped the ball here in many ways but we can't just compare the data of regular Internet to thatnof MMS. While it uses the same "series of tubes" the content is stored on AT&T's servers. With the Push Notification Server needing to be reworked to accomodate a the iPhone traffic, the iPhone being the only phone in Flickr's top 5 devices posting images and just the shear amount of data that the iPhone uses AT&T may be a little too cautious here.

I'd rather have them delay it until it works well instead the current situation of selling iPhones into a saturated network which means that despite the billions hey spend it's still just catchup and will likely never be good enough until the iPhone sales at AT&T subside for awhile.

Originally, MMS was designed for 3G networks but with the slow uptake by carriers the service was made to work with EDGE and GPRS. I had hoped that Apple's requirement for a 3G network was so that larger files could be sent, but so far the 3.1 version of the iPhone only has the MMS turned on with no other special feature. Oh yeah, if this goes live on Sept 25th then v3.1 will also be released that day.

I've had MMS and tethering since the 3.0 update (in Australia), I sent 1 MMS to test it, it works, I received 1 MMS to test it, that works too.

Seriously it's overrated by the time the compressed pictures make it through the phone networks they look like crap on the iPhones screen, sure on your dinky little 160x120 screen from 4 years ago the pictures may have looked ok but it is a service that sucks.

This is why I never used it much over the last five or six years, email is elevenbillionty times better.

I use tethering a lot more, I was getting tyres this morning and tethered my MacBook via bluetooth, maybe AT&T needs to do what we do here, limit data use I get 1 GB of data so watch what I use, so does everyone else.

Bandwidth is a shared resource, it's not infinite maybe it's time to dump the see how much I can get, epeen contest, hogs who destroy the experience for everyone else.

Edited for stupidity.

umm... no reason to look 'overseas'.

mms and tethering are both working in canada on rogers, a company not usually known for its generosity.

so far both features are included with the (3 year!) higher end plans and pricing will be decided in december. i suspect this is going to be a bait and switch situation, but there's hoping....

yeah right...

I'm actually surprised to see a Moderator of a Forum give a "real" unbiased opinion.

I think everyone in the tech industry has seen this for a while but Apple Apologists continue to give Apple a pass for a "Feature" that has been on Free phones for years.

Nice post & the reason the iPhone will be my last Apple product among countless other control issues that the App Store has to deal with.

I want control of what goes on my phone & that includes Flash.

Just because it sucks on Safari doesnt mean it doesnt Rock on every other platform.

wow. so much bitching about having to wait another 3 days to use antiquated messaging on a cell phone. how have you all survived this long with only email, posting videos directly to facebook, and the entire internet? if you don't like it, switch carriers and use a blackberry.

relax.

I think you have that wrong. Apple had to pull it's commercials for NOT having the Internet in your pocket.

Flash is the largest mainstream video distribution on the Internet and the iPhone will Never have it.

If I can't watch a CNN video on my phone I don't have the Internet in my pocket.
Maybe when the Apple gets over the control issues you'll have the Internet in your pocket.
Until then look to Android and HTC (Yes Winmo) with Adobe working with Palm and the Pre and Blackberry on the way.

They have the Internet in your pocket. Until then I have 55,000 useless Apps and Safari on my iPhone.


There is not an App for that.

...and if you read another of today's AI articles, everyone is saying it's no big deal that snow leopard downgrades it, praising clicktoflash for eliminating all of the flash banners from sites such as... ummm, who uses annoying flash ad banners?

As I said in my previous post. Just because Flash sucks on the OSX & Safari doesn't mean it doesn't rock on every other platform. Flash player is on 98% of all computers in the world because it is the platform of choice to distribute video.

You can just as easily put an ad banner up in GIF. I don't see AppleInsider turning down the Flash Revenue.

Hulu, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC have all chosen Flash is their means of distributing video.

Turn it off on your Mac. I choose to love the way it performs on my PC and with my HDMI cable hooked up to my TV I have the best of the Internet and FREE TV.

Pay for it on iTunes. This is why Apple lost the War in the 90's.

ADOBE flash player, made by ADOBE, distributed by ADOBE, developers HAVE to buy software from ADOBE to use it.

For someone who wants to whine about Apple's supposed "closed" system you sure do seem to like probably THE most closed system of all i.e. ADOBE Flash where you wait for updates at ADOBE's whim.

No doubt your search for a better phone experience will probably lead you to one that uses WebKit that open source project developed by Apple.

Roll on HTML 5 and the death of ADOBE's plug in tyranny!



btw I am watching a CNN story on my iPhone as I type this on my Macbook.

It works fine WITHOUT ADOBE...

...a drunk mother ran off and left her car.

Get the News addict App there's a lot of the sites you mentioned with video's.

The sites come to the iPhone, not the other way around.

Apple had to pull its commercials in the UK for advertising that it had the FULL internet on the iPhone. That is fine as its not correct if you include plugins, but even with Flash its still not the FULL internet because it wouldnt have Silverlight, Windows Media, ActiveSync, Java, Real, or any of the thousands of plugins that are out there.Then there are the variances between browsers and the fact that Apple is using a mobile browser that didnt pass a lot of the HTML5 specs, so any site that is using IE-only (Trident engine) tags or newer tags that the iPhone WebKit engine wasnt capable of would still make the commercial false. However, you seem to be concluding that the statement is false BECAUSE they didnt have an Adobe Flash plugin.

Its interesting that you said that "Adobe is working with Palm [& RiM]. Why didnt Adobe have a Flash plugin ready a long time ago? Why is that Apple said that they would welcome a Flash plugin if Adobe could actually make one that was decent? Why has Adobe repeatedly made more and more excuses for a mobile Flash plugin if its so easy to do and it works so well?

Yes, we all want to have our streaming media everywhere we are, but simply having a plugin titled Flash will not do that. Have you checked the FAQ for Hulu and other sites to see what version of Flash is required? I cant even get Hulu to play 480p video on 1.8GHz Acer AspireOne well, so its a bit odd to think that its Apple fault for not fixing Flash for Adobe.

As for your comment about 55k useless apps and Safari on the iPhone, its clear that you dont own an iPhone nor have never seen the stats of data and app usage among iPhone users.

err, what's a land line?







Lol

Again, the FIRST DAY OF FALL IS September 22, 2009 at 5:18 pm EDT.

How can 3 days after the beginning of fall be considered "late summer"?

Maybe AT&T needs to put "late summer" in their terms list defined as "in reality, early fall"

It's just gone Spring in Australia, that's another six months until "late summer".

"We truly appreciate our customers patience and hope they'll understand our desire to get it right from the start."


And why do I have the feeling they'll still get it wrong!

I really don't think so. AT&T had a crappy 3G network to begin with. Verizon's was far superior (and is). They knew the iPhone was going to be huge. They made the deal with Apple and crossed their fingers that they could rig their network not to look like assholes. "Go to bed and hope it all turns out OK in the morning." That's what they did.


I agree, but AT&T had to know this. In fact, I'm sure they did. I think they knew their network couldn't handle it and did the deal anyway.


So in their network planning they just utterly ignored the iPhone's potential impact? Come on.


Agreed there. Quick and dirty, indeed.





DING DING DING! We have a winner. It makes no sense whatsoever.


Thanks guys. That was the best description I could come up with. It's pretty accurate.


The problem is not their servers. The problem is the actual towers that comprise the network can't handle the volume of data and the number of simultaneous connections. We can absolutely compare MMS to "other" data usage...it's the same network. Right now we have "regular" phone users doing MMS with no problem. We also have iPhone users who now use 10-100x the data of those users. So let me get this straight: Adding MMS to one kind of phone will add so much data as to strain the network? This, despite the average MMS being perhaps 1/10th the size of e-mailed photos?


If it really took them two years to get this ready, then their more incompetent than I thought.



You're not reading then. I don't really care about the 3 days. I care about two years. I care about shitty call quality. I care about delayed voicemails, dropped calls, etc. And I care about not being able to receive a simple picture message from friends and family without going online.

That's because CNN puts partial news feeds into a format that will work on the iPhone.

Try it stock from Safari and go to Politics and click on political ticker. Squares.

It still doesn't negate that Flash is a world standard for distributing Video.

I dont want a site to have to put their content into a format the iPhone will accept.
I want the Internet in my pocket. Not what Apple and App Store Applications tell me I want to see.

They're a whole 3 days late. So sue them.

Oh, wait. Someone already did.




Wow. So you're PROUD of the fact that you're a juvenile delinquent?

Just how would crashing AT&T's network make anyone's life better?





In most of the world, 3 months IS a reasonable time frame. Apple announced it in June and it will be available in Sept.


And you think they wouldn't have turned it on if you hadn't 'demanded' it?

Better yet, maybe companies could put their content into an industry standard - like html 5. Then it will work fine on ALL systems. If companies used web standards, coding for the Internet would be far easier and the results would be far better-for everyone.

Flash is a dog on EVERY platform. You hear Windows users complaining about it just as much as Mac users.