Please no crossposting! Re: Information regarding theMessaging Support in OpenMoko

Knight Walker moko at kobran.org
Thu Feb 1 08:05:36 CET 2007


On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 22:48 -0700, Richi Plana wrote:
> I, personally, do not use MMS. I'm not even sure if that service is
> available here in Calgary, AB with the carriers here. I've had a dinky,
> free phone since the start waiting for the right phone (this one) to
> come along. However, we should also keep in mind that which the majority
> of phones out there support, and right now (at least in Europe according
> to the research mentioned above), it seems to be MMS.

I remember when I first got SMS on my phone way back in the day.  No one
seemed to care.  But several years later, it actually made the news when
some networks announced inter-network interoperability in the MMS arena,
after it became rather obvious that people like shooting grainy,
low-resolution camera phone pics and instantly sending them to their
friends.  Personally, I would rather use MMS for its ability to send up
to 1000 characters per message, rather than the paltry 160 of SMS (And
my network charges me per-message, not per-byte for either).  Maybe I
just write too much, but sometimes my phone breaks up a message into 3
(or more) SMS messages and it gets really aggravating if it coughs in
the middle and fails to send because something went wrong with part 2 or
3.

> One approach we could use is to have the application layer (the GUI as
> seen by the user) designed right, and the underlying protocol would be
> the one to differ. So a user can compose some multimedia message and it
> could be sent out as MMS (possibly with a loss of formatting due to
> constraints in MMS). This would be a smart way to get users used to our
> application frontend so that when we switch to that better
> infrastructure you're dreaming of, it would make no difference to the
> users. They'll just notice that things have just gotten better. Once the
> current MMS users who've bought into OpenMoko have had a taste of what
> we can offer, they wouldn't want to go back. But we have to hook them in
> the first place.

That was basically my thought as well.  I would like to see is an
integrated Messaging application that is capable of integrating all
available messaging back-ends in one place and lets the user (Or the
content or recipient address if it comes to that) decide the method to
send the message.  I believe some other phones do something like this
already.  But then again, I would also like to be able to store
messaging preferences in the Contacts list, so I can do things like send
specially-encoded messages to other MoKo owners (with things like
formatting, encryption, etc) and send regular SMS or MMS messages to
those unfortunate souls who have not yet joined us.

-KW





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