AT&T activates MMS for iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS users - Page 4

As an early adopter of MMS I used to send MMS to email addresses all the time until other people started getting MMS capable phone's it was the only option, why don't you try it.

Instead of entering a phone number in the 'to' field when composing an MMS enter an email address instead, use any MMS capable phone you want.

Sending an MMS to an email address usually has a better success rate than sending to a phone number, especially to oversea's recipients or those on other networks.

So of the total number of messages sent, you don't think that MMS only makes up a small percentage as compared to SMS...

...mmmkay 0_o

In the UK MMS are counted as messages, not data, you can see the facts here :-

http://www.text.it/mediacentre/press...76792676426D0C

How does that negate the use of MMS VIDEO as a relevant source of information? Ans: IT DOESNT

In the UK MMS messages are 0.7% of the SMS numbers. That is very insignificant.

Sending MMS to email accounts usually is required by those that are to CHEAP to pay for MMSon their phones. The whiners on here that are unhappy that Apple enabled this really need to stop and get with the program. Can't they see that Apple has given them anew feature for the iPhone that's relevant and should be a feature on any phone n the 21 st century? It's like them not wanting voicemail and requiring email instead. People get with the program. Just because you don't like it - it's not going away. Apple says it's cool now to have so embrace it nd get over it.

In relation to people sending videos to a TV station via MMS which was what was under discussion if you look back over the relevant replies.

A TV station does not need a phone number to receive MMS an email address serve the purpose just as well.

Well when was the UK ever on the cutting edge of anything? You still have that queen and the rest of your royalty.

OK and? How else would they get it - burned on a disc?

Sorry I stand to be corrected. I thought I was half the family plan rate or $15. It's $20

how would you prefer it- burned on a disc?

Well, as there were some posts discussing the feasability of attaching cellphone's to computers in order for television stations to receive MMS, I thought I'd set the record straight.

Mel, you should know better. That article provides no context and quotes worldwide instead of figures in places like the U.S.

This would be like me claiming the iPhone isn't popular because WORLDWIDE it sells a very small percentage of phones compared to countries where people are using $15 candybar phones while herding sheep.

A text message is 160 bytes. A MMS message can be 300k+. Even if it were 1% of total messages the data differences would be huge but the state itself provides no context. How does knowing what percentage of total messaging it represents show how it is unpopular? It is just hand waving.

Not only is MMS unpopular now, it was never popular. It was never a must have feature. Does anyone remember when cameras first started appearing on phones. The carriers almost killed it as a useful feature by limiting the way pictures were shared. You had to pay money to upload the pictures to a website and look at them. Even so, you could not necessarily download them to your computer. Taking pictures was a chore and getting them off the phone was nearly impossible. Camera phones were useless and expensive. People were looking for phones that did not have cameras in them.

It was only then that carriers introduced MMS. It was a way that people could send those pictures to other mobile users and double pay the carrier for the privilege. The iPhone was one of the first phones with a camera that you could actually use as a camera. You could take pictures with it and sync them to your computer without hassle. Suddenly, people didn't have to be locked in by the carrier's schemes to charge for you using the pictures you took on your phone. The iPhone was freedom from MMS. MMS was never more than a half-baked money grab by the carriers to further abuse the consumer and cripple their hardware.

Apple should not have caved in to the disingenuous MMS pressure; they should have applied pressure on the industry to kill it and free people to use the technology in their phones without undo restrictions.

...except nothing has gone through. Getting one in ten to go would at least help in differentiating problem. I assume it's AT&T service. Guess I'll wait a day or two, and try again.

Thanks for that. You've finally explain what no one else here could. The speed is due in part of the size of the SMS vs email equivalent.

Apple knows what they're doing trust us. They may have made some bad hardware decisions in the past but this is only late because is was not high on the priority list as solipism has surly note for the iPhone.

The new iPhone update has limited mass texting to 10 people!! This is the worst possible thing to do.. I'm sure it was done to counter balance the mms rollout.. So upset about this!

If you need to share a picture with more than ten people at once, you might want to look into Facebook, MobileMe, and Flicker.

You assume MMS in the US would be significantly different than what it is worldwide. That isn't the case. The US was relatively slow to adopt SMS in comparison to the rest of the world.

Your MMS usage to iPhone sales analogy doesn't really fit, they are entirely two different situations.

The way you look at the popularity of any messaging service is to compare how much it is used in comparison to alternative messaging services. Its been proven many times that other services are more widely used and more useful than MMS. You want to rule those facts as invalid. What do you feel would be a valid measurement of messaging?

I agree, what is really the point of sending multiple messages when you can post it once, and multiple people can see it.

So far to mark this momentus day. No one has sent me an MMS message. I've been asking fellow iPhone users if they know about MMS. Most don't know about it and few care.

This limit of 10 is for all texts, not just MMS...

Good for you- so stop polluting the MMS thread then.

Lol I just received this from AT&T over 1 day late!:



AT&T is so late!!!

It's hard to know where to start. First of all, some of you need to have a better understanding of what a statistically significant number is. 2.5% of several billion is a very significant number. Yes, it's a small percentage of the total number of texts but that's b/c you don't include a photo with every sentence of a conversation. The ratio of photos to words in a textbook is very small so does that make the pictures insignificant? In 2005/2006 the percentage of the world population that had HIV/AIDS was 0.9%. Would you call that insignificant? The examples go on and on.

One last thing to consider is that sometimes girls like to share photos with lucky guys like myself that they wouldn't want to post on a social networking site, if you catch my drift... and when they do that it is usually via MMS. It has been rather annoying that for the past couple years I had to reply with "could you email that instead?" Kind of a mood killer, you know?

Well, then you'd get a more fapulous rendition.


btw they don't have to email it as you can send an MMS to an email address.

Someone else showed it was just .7% of messages in the UK.

Even if the figure doesn't spec the USA itself, so what?Are the only people who use iPhones in the USA? I don't think so.

The only place where it seems to be really popular is Japan, so far at least. That would swing these figures even further downwards if the Japanese numbers were excluded.

Your comparison has no meaning, because IT has no context. The iPhone sells against other smartphones. It doesn't sell against $15 dollar phones, though the $99 dollar model might be compelling enough for some of those low baller buyers. So Apple's got a 12.8% marketshare worldwide in smartphones, which is the proper context. In the US, as you want some numbers from here, the iPhone is 30% of smartphones. More context.

It doesn't matter how much data is being sent. The popularity is the number of messages sent. These numbers are related to the number of messages, not the amount of data. If it meant data, then the number of MMS's sent would be far fewer. So I don't understand why you brought that up.

If something is just 4.5% of the total, its unpopular. Like the Mac's percentage around the world. What does that tell us? It just tells us that most people don't think they want to do that, or use it. It doesn't meant that they won't in the future. But we can just go by todays numbers.

Also, I can't find useful information about USA usage that's recent. The problem with the USA articles is that while some say that MMS usage is increasing by large amounts, it's so low in the USA that those large increases are expected. But the increases in the EU have been slowing down. Last year it was 16%, and while that sounds really good, that's on the downslope.

So worldwide figures are here for us, and they do have meaning.

If you can provide some new USA percentages of use, then please do so. It isn't that I haven't been looking.

Where did he mention e-mail? He didn't. He clearly compared the 160 character SMS to a 300KB MMS message.

A lot of this is common on all networks.

The purpose is to prevent spam.

This is no different than mail servers turning mass e-mail messages back.

It's also the same reason why some web site forums won't allow you to send another post for a specified time. Try to post successive posts on an Anandtech forum. You can't.

It's your misunderstanding. Popularity is measured by percentage, not just absolute numbers.

If Apple sold 70% of all digital media players, and the sold a million a year, and MS sold ten thousand, the neither of them would be popular when compared to other players perhaps, such as possibly a still popular Walkman.

But if just talking about digital media players, the iPod would be popular, and the Zune would be unpopular.

But if Apple sold 50 million a year, and the Zune sold a million, then the iPod would be popular in an absolute sense, and when compared to that, the Zune would be unpopular, even though MS sold the same million that I had in my first scenario.

MMS is unpopular, very few of the messages sent as a percentage of all messages sent are MMS. That averages less than one MMS per smartphone, and far less than that when compared to all phones that can send them. That's pretty unpopular when compared to the number of SMS's sent by the same number of phones.

I am understanding just fine. You're still not seeing that you can't compare the number of SMS to MMS to arrive at an outcome of "popularity". They are two different things the same way that an email and an email with an attachment are different things. 98% of emails probably don't contain a picture attachment. I guess picture attachments in email aren't popular then. Oh, but wait...they're are extremely popular. Anyway, who are you to make a blanket statement like "MMS is unpopular" - like it's a definite thing. It's just your opinion and one you're trying to support it with numbers that don't relate.


Where do you get this stuff? Mac's only have 11% market share (estimated). Would you say that Mac's aren't popular? iPhones...by your data...are only 30% of the smartphone market. That means 70% are something else. Are iPhones not popular? Or do you have some magic percentage where you feel something is popular. If so, please share it with us.

MMS is very popular among a very small group of people.

There does that sound better, or a very small percentage of phone users send MMS.

Which is borne out by the figures showing MMS usage as a part of total message usage is a very small number.

The most popular use of MMS in recent years, seems to be as something to whine about the iPhone lacking.

Coming next video calls which is also hugely popular amongst an even smaller percentage of phone users.

They are both messages. MMS has been out for a while in a number of places, and it's not being used that much.

If there are 100 million smartphones out there and there is less than .5 MMS per smartphone sent a year, you call that popular? That's not including, as I said before, all the other phones that can do MMS. Meanwhile, the iPhone is the most popular camera on Facebook. Those pics aren't being sent by MMS. I don't know more than a small handful of people who have used MMS to send pics anywhere. They use e-mail for that because it's better, and you know it will work, which is more than can be said for MMS.

Meanwhile SMS has been getting more popular, and it's used a lot these days, surprisingly for me, the US included, so far, MORE than e-mail.

So yes, they can be compared.


Macs have a 4% worldwide marketshare. And even though I'm a very big Mac user, as everyone who has been here for a while knows very well, I'm not going to deny the truth. Around the world, they are just not popular.

A 30% rate, in the USA, for the iPhone, is pretty popular, because it's one of the most purchased smartphones. Around the world, it's 12.8%, not as popular.

Are these numbers too much for you to understand?

That's it, exactly. The people who complained about the iPhone lacking it were not iPhone proponents hoping to make the platform better. They were mostly journalists with a bone to pick against Apple and everything they do. Does anyone really think Molly Wood from cNet will start speaking well of the iPhone now? No! Now they say that the iPhone is pathetic for being so late to the game. The beat goes on: same rhythm, different drum.

I'm surprised no one has bashed the iPhone for not having a redial button. At least that is a feature people actually use.

He's grasping at straws. Firstly he can't explian why it's faster which is likethe number 1 reason people use it. Thenhe fails to explain why Apple would provit it alo g with EVERY OTHER cellphone on the market. I think it's a generational thing- he'll never get it.

See my reply above

that would be nice actually- you think we'll get it in 4.0?

You're probably right.

Well said.

What you need to do is update it with the same os that u set up the iPhone. I get that with my iPod touch because I set it up on a Macbook and every time I updated it on a xp machine it goes into rescue mode. I think it is how the memory is formatted (fat vs hfs).