Last week the news broke that the Swedish / Finnish telco operation Teliasonera is launching an MMS application for the iPhone “within the coming months”. As indicated in my previous blog entry, the MMS client itself comes from a company called Mobispine. As Optaros is working with a couple of iPhone implementations at the moment, and have a lot of exposure to the telco market, I’ve tried to understand a bit more about this offering, basically trying to answer the questions I had on the new service.
- Does it support SMIL message receiving and composing?
From the first info I got from Mobispine, the level of support is still a bit unclear - Camera & pics gallery integration?
Yes - On 3G only or also in WIFI?
Yes, you can also use the service over WiFi; seems obvious given the iPhone’s switching to WiFi if available, but has an application design repercussion because of how the SDK is used. - How does it integrate into the existing messaging infrastructure of the operators to enable authentication, roaming support, standard billing, etc?
The operator needs to buy into Mobispine’s PC-to-mobile SMS solution, then the user is billed seemlessly via their phone account. The latest blog entry from Mobispine states that the business model is still up for discussion, so indicating fine tuning of this part is still to be done.
Some more info:
- On AppStore?
The application has not yet been certified and approved for AppStore. Each operator launching this service is going to go thru AppStore for certification and publishing. - How are new MMS Notifications done?
New MMS notification is planned to be done through the Apple Push Notification service, once available (obivously it was not in the 2.2 release that came out end of last week). In the meanwhile, SMS notifications of new MMS might be used.
