Alternatives to MMS

A few years ago MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) was going to be the thing to really make the most of Camera Phones, the quickest and easiest way of sharing your photos with a friend or a family member. Sadly it seems like the lifespan of the MMS is almost over, the high cost of the service and size limitations have effectively killed it before it became the success it was expected to be. When Camera Phones first hit the market around the turn of the century few expected phones to advance to the point where they became small and powerful mobile computers (as Smart Phones now are), it's been the move to Smart Phones that has effectively killed the MMS.

Rather than writing a long obitury of the MMS I've instead decided to look at some of the most useful alternatives to actually using MMS, something I quickly did in an old article looking at the pros and cons of using e-mail instead of MMS. Whilst it is true that E-mail is still the prefered way for some, such as myself, it's certainly not the only way, in fact their is so many different ways that I'm not even going to be able to cover them all, just the most straight forward ones.

The most widely used "third option" (behind MMS and E-mail) are the new messenger apps, things such as Whatspp? and Ebuddy XMS which allow you to send pictures, messages and other forms of media over the internet for free. This is a service much like sending images over MSN for example. For this you only need to make sure you and your friend are both using the same messenger service and both online at the same time. Whilst some people may like this method (and some genuinely do use it an awful lot of the time) I've not been sold over to it personally due to fact that I've simply found Emailing to be quicker, though this is likely to change over the coming years as these services continue to improve.

Facebook has been an internet super-power for the past few years and now you can use the massive social networking sites to send pictures directly from your phone to someone on your friends list. To do this you need to use the Facebook "Messenger" app and select it as a "Share via" option (with an Android, I'm not exactly sure with other phones) when you've selected a picture, then slect a friend. This is a bit of a middle line between e-mail and the above messaging apps as this can be recieved on a PC or a Phone (or anywhere else where the recipient can access their Facebook).

You could as a fifth option (and by far the least attractive for some pictures) share them publicly via Social Networking sites like Twitter, Picasa or Google+. If the picture is something you do want to share with a wider viewing public this is a much better option than E-mailing it to a number of people. However on the flip, if the picture is something that you would only like one particular person to see you'd be rather silly to use this option.

As said at the start of this post, modern phones do have a host of other options to share pictures, though I'd say these are the main 5 to look at if you wish to share the picture with someone further a field than the Bluetooth range on your handset. Of course if you are close enough to use Bluetooth I'd reccomend using that instead as it's quicker and much easier than using things like Ebuddy XMS or Facebook.

How to send video messages (MMS) from your Samsung Galazy S2

 So you've got a brand new Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone, one of the market leading handsets and you want to send your mate a video of something. To do this you need to change a few things before you start. Obviously you need to open the Camera application to begin then you need to select the video camera option (move the slide on the side from the camera icon to video camera option). After you've done this click on the "cog" icon for the Settings menu and change the recording mode to "Limit for MMS".

 After you do this you will notice one big change to the usual settings menu. The "Resolution" option will be locked out and lock in a rather poor rate of 176x144 a massive downgrade on the possible HD video recording ability of the phone. This is a bit disappointing though is simple to explain. The MMS system has a rather small limit on how much data can be sent, the low ratio means you can record several seconds of video whilst 1 second of HD video goes massively over the limit.

After you've selected the right settings then recorded your video you need to click on it in the bottom right hand corner (see the image of a garden in the image above) and you'll get a small menu at the bottom of the screen saying "Share", "Play" and "Delete". If you click "Share" you get the menu that is similar to the one you can see to the right hand side here. The option you want to click is "Messaging" which will open up the
recogniseable messaging screen you can see to the left here.

As my haphazard on screen guide says you need to add your recipient, your message then click send. This will count as an MMS message so beware if you haven't got an MMS allowance that it will be added to your bill (and can be quite a noticeable amount).

As I mentioned earlier, this won't be a video that will show off the HD recording ability of the phone though and it will, sadly, look rather blurry (even with the Superfine setting). This is due to the limitations of the MMS system and the networks own standard as opposed to the phone it's self. Hopefully future technology will allow for bigger and better quality MMS to be shared.