MMS is included with text packages. I don’t know any carriers that have a “pay-per-use” policy with them. It’s been that way for years.

MMS is still standard because it’s perfect for a mobile device. If you want to send a quick picture you just took to somebody, it gets resized to an image that’s still substantially larger than the recipients screen but is small enough in size that it doesn’t bog down phones on slower networks.

The funniest part about iPhone users and MMS is that the almighty email solution that iPhone users are so quick to abandon MMS for does exactly what an MMS does: it resizes the image down to VGA quality, the same as an MMS, which defeats the purpose of emailing a picture in the first place.

The market that no one pays attention to when it comes to MMS is those who don’t have computers. Like what is now all iPhone users, I’ve been emailing pictures between my friends on our smartphones for some time now just to retain the image quality, but there are plenty of people who don’t have email addresses at all, but have the conveniences of sending and receiving pictures through their phone instead.

The only thing that makes the iPhone different in terms of how it handles pictures is that you can only send pictures to email addresses instead of to mobile numbers as well and there’s no way to transfer that content at its original 2mp quality until you sync back up with your computer.

For instance, the comments about pay per message MMS being replaced by email, should also apply to SMS… but Apple included SMS.