AT&T preparing to bring MMS to iPhone 3G?

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

• Mike

  MMS may be seldom used in the USA, but it is very popular in the UK and Europe, and not being able to send or receive MMS is a problem.

• Chris

  Strange…I just read that this supposed “internal memo” was a hoax. Sorry to bust anybody’s bubble, but this story just isn’t true.

• Glenn

  If it isn’t true and Apple is selling this phone in Europe (which uses MMS a lot)–they would have to do some serious reprogramming to disable that feature for US users. Doesn’t make any sense.

• Nic J

  I never thought that was a ‘seldom used’ feature.. I send pictures messages CONSTANTLY, well SENT them, when I had a crappy older phone that was way less sweet!

  Who wouldnt want a picture to reference whatever youre texting about? i.e. “Hey Joe, Im at the beach and youre stuck living in Minnesota, look how beautiful the sky and women are here (including picture)

  shrug, maybe Im alone.

• gary

  ugh.. something as simple as sending a picture in a text message. its almost like technology time travel.. only backwards. wtf?

• Ron

  Seldom used? What planet are you from? It’s a pain in the ass to send through email versus just using someone’s mobile number. I take a pic, grab a number from my contacts list, and send. That’s it. I don’t have to worry about whether or not the other person can access their email from their mobile phone. MMS is convenient and used way more than you’d like to believe. Ask the millions of people on other networks besides AT&T.

• Accord

  When iphone does MMS I will buy iphone..

• Glenn

  MMS is the way to go if you want to communicate with people in Europe like I do. Really ucks have to try and to an email account when most people overseas only have to use a cellphone number. ATT is behind the times and the capailities (or lack of) says a lot about their lack of interest in catching up with the rest of the world.

• Jeff

  I’ve had my iPhone since last November, and I generally love it. My biggest complaint, however, is the shocking…and I say shocking for such a sophisticated device…lack of MMS. In other words, you cannot easily send or receive pictures via text. Most of my friends do not have email on their phones and regularly send pictures. On my sad little iPhone, these go to a nearly useless ViewMyMessage ATT website that rarely works. When the site does work, the picture is tiny and almost impossible to view. You cannot save the picture and after a few days it erases. Some people, apparently like the author of this article, believe this is no loss because you can email pictures. It IS a huge problem however. Most other cell phones cannot receive emailed pictures and friends without email-enabled cell phones cannot send to my iPhone.

  It is a huge problem as evidenced by the thousands of rants and comments demanding Apple and ATT fix this oversight.

• Jason

  for you guys who want to SEND a MMS message to another ATT phone, from your iphone, all you have to do, is simply email it to (555)555-1212@mms.att.net (insert their phone number where the “555″ is obviously) and they will get the MMS and picture attachment from your email, directly to your phone. however, other carriers may or may not have a similar service.

  receiving a MMS is a different story tho.

• Amanda

  Wow, could you sound more condescending about a phone feature?

  My friend isn’t lucky enough to have a phone with email capability (I’m not even sure she would turn it on if she did) and sending pictures is a major part of how we communicate. Did I mention we live 1000 miles apart?

  I think it is a necessary function, at least until everyone has the ability to have email on their phones.

• Jason

  Amanda…. what service does your friend have? they dont have to have an email capable phone to recieve a MMS message from an iphone. all you have to do is send it to their phone number at the right email address, and their service changes it to a MMS message and it goes straight to their phone.

  but like i said… recieving is different.

• Amanda

  She has Cincinnati Bell so I have no idea what the texting email would be.

• Jason

  Amanda.

  send her a MMS at phonenumber@gocbw.com

• Amanda

  Sorry, that doesn’t seem to work. She is what she told me “it said zeros and there was no image”.

  Thanks for trying though I really appreciate it.

• Amanda

  Just an update – It worked when I sent it to phonenumber@mms.gocbw.com

• Jeffrey

  It doesn’t work. You can try to send an email to an AT&T phone number but the iPhone user never gets the message. It is either being blocked by AT&T or the format is totally wrong. I think the format is right though, I used to do that exact type of thing, sending an email to a phone number as MMS and it always worked fine with my Palm. But now with the iPhone you can not get it to work.

  This is the deal, Apple screwed up. AT&T is screwing everyone and your typical Apple Fanatic can not grasp the concept that the almighty Steve Jobs and co. could possibly create a device that isn’t perfect! Oh my! What heresy is this that I speak? My MacBook Pro main board fried exactly 15 months after purchase. Why? Because the people that built the MacBook pro over in Indonesia or China forgot to smear the main board with a heat dissipating gel that would keep exactly that from occurring. Oh well you might say. It’s an Apple product, not supposed to go bad so why buy Apple care? Lesson learned. The Mac genius told me to sell it for parts. It will cost $900.00 to fix. It’s happened to thousands of MacBook Pro owners but Apple won’t own up to it.

  Now Apple is in total denial about the failure of the 3g features on the iPhone and the complete and total disaster they created with MobileMe and Apps on the iPhone.

  I say, welcome to the world of Mac-rosoft.

• Amanda

  I really don’t consider myself an Apple Fanatic, although other people probably would. Apple products just seem to work for me more than others. Computers break down, shit goes wrong, people screw up. It’s a fact of life that we all have to live with.

  I have an iPhone, MacBookPro, iMac G5 and a iBook G3 along with a bunch of Dell computers (Don’t get me started on Dell and their crappy customer service) so I have a pretty good cross section. But my iMac G5 computer just suddenly one day fried the hard drive. I have no idea why but I didn’t get all pissed off and curse Steve Jobs. I just lived with it (and learned to back my stuff up) because for me this was better than the millions of times I wanted to throw my HP laptop out of the window. I just came to the realization that Windows doesn’t like me. So we try not to cross paths as much as we can. That doesn’t mean I think Mac’s are gods or anything.

  Apple/AT&T will eventually give us the option to send MMS messages or they won’t but we will continue either way.

• Ke

  My son is in the Army I need MMS…he tries to send me photos and wants me to send him some…please someone do something…just crazy.

• Adam McNutt

  @ Jeff:

  You can save pics by holding your finger on the image. A menu then pops up asking if you want to save the image or cancel.

  Enjoy!

• GlennR

  Just another way for Apple and ATT to milk us for more money. They left MMS out of the hardware on purpose.

• KiM

  Agreed with Fabry that the swirly space of the iPhone MMS App looks pretty good.

• James

  I so wish this was true and in the works!!! I miss being able to natively MMS message my friends… and for them to be able to MMS me!!!

• Mark M

  Don’t hold your breath. Also, I don’t want to CRACK, JAILBREAK or UNLOCK my phone to put someone else program on it. This feature should have been part of the phone from the beginning, just like the other missing, but common features that you find on just about every other phone out there
  1. Cut and Paste
  2. BlueTooth Stereo
  3. BlueTooth syncing
  4. BlutTooth file sharing
  5. Video Capture
  6. MMS (what we are talking about)

  When and if they do update the phone to allow these features, I might upgrade then…otherwise, I will stick with my TILT.

• RYAN

  it is upsetting the iphone does not have mms personally i send and recieve tons of mms messages. what was apple thinking ????

• marco

  I believe that Apple’s thoughts were, lets make this phone revolutionary, lets make it sexy, lets make it so much better than all other phones so lets leave all the old technology behind and go with what we at Apple think is the next step!! WTF!!! not a good way of thinking if it means leaving technology like MMS in the dust when millions of people use this on a day to day bases. I guess the other cell phone users that dont have an iphone with email capability can carry their PCs with them so that when they want to send a MMS to iphone users they are able to do so.
  I have yet had the luck to have that horrible, horrible website to see the pics that people send me, it never works!!! Viewmymessages = Phail!!!!

  Nonethe less a magnificent phone!>| Please Apple listen to your customers and do something about this.. It is shameful for great minds to think so narrowmindedly.

• Hawk

  I upgraded to an Iphone after being told it could send and rec pics. I think the moron in store obviously was misleading. I and many people I know all have sent and rec. mms pics I regret upgrading and losing that feature. For the technology and money today they could get it together, now I am stuck with a phone that only does half the features I use, like and need.

• Ryan

  The “FetchMMS” program seems really cool, but what sucks is:

  “PLEASE NOTE: Messages sent to AT&T iPhone customers is currently not allowed by AT&T and attempts to send an MMS message to an AT&T iPhone will most certainly fail. Not all devices are supported. At the present time, messages sent to T-Mobile, US Cellular, Boost Mobile and Verizon customers work the best, almost instantly.”

  For all AT&T users, its just anouther reason to dislike the service AT&T provides. I’m on my last nerve with AT&T right now, does anyone have any information to calm the level of pain?

• Chris

  AGREED! i mean come on, if your friend lets say is in florida and sees one of your friends and sends you a picture of them with it how fun would that be? Or if your in Colorado, want to snowboard (wish i do), and film a short video and send it to all your friends/family/girlfriends/boyfriends/etc.

  Don’t you think people even in the US send a multimedia message every now and then. My freaking Grandmother does it all the time, why shouldn’t we?!
  now I am stuck with a phone that only does half the features I use, like and “NEED”.(thank you Hawk)

• J

  How will I ever get all these nude pictures!

• Pete

  Hookmobile – for all it’s best intentions, is half-useless (along with a few other similar apps), can’t RECEIVE MMS’s on your iPhone. Shocking that Apple is being such a bunch of Pr**ks about not allowing MMS, but then again, it’s Apple…the company who’s otherwise excellent computer products are religated to a few niche markets because of inane business paradigms. I’m sure Swirly’s submission to the app store was rejected. ATT could bypass the limitation by detecting and re-routing inbound text messages with MMS content to email but either hasn’t thought of it (like they haven’t thought of calendar sync on Blackberry), doesn’t care, or is afraid of Apple. They could even use a dedicated email address combined with a Hookmobile-like interface to provide seamless inbound/outbound MMS functionality without ACTUALLY doing MMS on the iPhone. I love my iPhone, but I’m frequently embasrrased by conversations like this one….

  Me – Early adopter, techno geek, into the latest and best technologies.
  Cro-Magnan – Utterly non technical, just discovered fire, owns a rotary-dial cell phone.

  A recent conversation….
  Cro-Magnan: U get cool pic me just send to phone?
  Me: No, I have an iPhone, it doesn’t get MMS’s
  Cro-Magnan: What is MMS? I no get note say u can’t get pic.
  Me: Uh, yea…it doesn’t tell you I couldn’t get it, it just never gets delivered.
  Cro-Magnan: Ugh! Why U pay 400 rocks and 40 rocks a month for iPhone then?
  Me: Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

• Slappy

  Still pathetic that the original $600 iphone will never be able to send MMS, however, free phones from service providers do this no problem. Can’t wait for my 2 year contract to be up so I can get a fully functional phone for much less initially and monthly.

• unclepyro

  i think that it would be easy for apple to just release an update that allows MMS (Picture multimedia messaging) messages but they are just being lazy….and how hard is it to allow video recording… the free ATT phone do both of those most of the time and an iphone 3g cant?

• justBoughtMy3GS

  Even 2 weeks after the release of the iPhone 3GS, I still had to stand in line for about an hour to get my phone. While standing in line, there was a giant iphone demo running in the main store window. I was amazed at the MMS capabilities shown over and over in the video demonstration. It looked so cool, and easy to use, I couldn’t wait to try it. Then i forked over my $300 (of course they conveniently only had 32GB models available…), took my iphone home, and after using it for awhile, realized there is no MMS capability available on my iphone.

  Thats when I started feeling like like a sucker who had been taken advantage of… How had Apple created so much hype as to make me stand in line for an hour, watch a marketing video over and over showing how cool MMS was, and give them my $300 and walk home with a product that doesn’t do what they showed on the video? If they were selling a car, you’d call that bait and switch. But, with Apple, everyone tells me to shut my mouth and just be happy I was fortunate enough that they allowed me to buy their fabulous product.

  I can’t believe they get away with advertising like that on something they haven’t yet delivered. They can blame it on AT&T all they want, but they were the ones showing the video advertisement and nowhere in the video did I see anything that said “Not currently available in the phone you are buying today… ” Instead, they set the expectation that MMS is available, when they know damn well it is not. Its simply dishonest and unethical in my opinion, but none of the Apple fanatics seem to want to hold them to it.

  Simply amazes me.

• goose

  Yo At$t, greed is the biggest enemy of wealth…Keep nickel and dimeing your customers. Any plans to charge even More for mms even though most of us are currently paying more for phone internet than our home dsl or cable. Guess what,unlocked and jailbroken Iphones work just fine on different Local networks; your customers will migrate to T-mobile and then what will you have? The new razr? Do good by those paying your bills and pleasing your shareholders and you will be rewarded or get on that bankruptcy train from Fucking your customers in the ass

• Gloria

  Seldom used? I use it all the time. I take a picture, send it to someone, and say “hey what do you think? Do you want this, or know someone who does” or something like that. Anyhow – I think they’ve misjudged about MMS. When I get a new phone, it will be one that has MMS.