iPhone MMS, FINALLY!

I had to shout out about the iPhone finally being capable of MMS!

A new app is available on the store called "MMS Photo Messaging". It allows your iPhone to receive MMS messages and it works really well. The even better news is that it's free to download and receive messages. While you're reading the rest of this post go and:

Download with iTunes

Right, when you've installed it all you have to do is enter your mobile number and the PIN you use to read your MMS messages on the O2 website. It will remember these in future and just take you straight to your inbox. Once there it downloads any existing MMS messages and will download any new ones as they are sent to you. So, the next time you get the SMS alert from O2 to say you have a new MMS, just load up the new app and it will be there for. It works in a similar way to the email application, so it should be fairly familiar and easy to use.

Now it's not perfect, a couple of things are holding it back, they are:

1) It costs money to send MMS messages, you have to buy credits for approximately 35p per message depending on how any credits you buy.

2) It can only do picture messages.

3) The service can suffer during high demand meaning it keeps asking for you to log in.

Now these are problems that are not too serious, it would be nice to have MMS messages come from your tariff. But clearly that is not possible for a 3rd party application, and it really is simple to buy credits. The price of sending messages is cheaper now than it was when it got released, there are also claims that prices will fall further in the future.

Now the service has been running for a while and it has become a lot more stable. I haven't had it fail on me for a a week or so now. This is great news, it's also great that Apple let this onto the App Store, finally admitting the need for an MMS application for the iPhone. Perhaps we will see MMS integrated into a future firmware, that would be nice. Until then though, this is a brilliant programme that everyone should have installed.