David R Storms.com

One of the exciting additions to the iPhone in the recent firmware update is the ability to send multi-media messages (pictures and video) the same as text messages. This is nothing new to the mobile phone market, as these features have been staples in products for many years. Could be that these things were left off the release table for Apple until now because it was too much work for them to get it in the phone, or they were planning ahead for future firmware releases and didn’t want to use up everything on their feature list!

Regardless, it is here on the iPhone and it is amazing! Also coming along with the update is the Internet tethering capability which had not been available to non jail-broken phones.

MMS

Unfortunately I wish that I had a 3G S phone so that I could test the video side of this, but alas I only have the 3G, so I will only cover my experience with pictures taken by the camera on the phone.

First thing you will see when you open the Messages app (used to be called a speech bubble called SMS but that wouldn’t make sense now would it!) you will notice near the text bar a small camera. Clicking on that little icon will bring up 2 options:

You can click “Take Photo” and jump right into the Camera app, or click “Choose Existing” and head into the Camera Roll and find the picture you want to send.

When you take the picture, you can optionally choose to Retake the photo, or click Use to have it go into your message.

You can type your text right in the speech bubble. I really like how the image is shrunk down and appears with the message. When you click send, it ends up in its own little speech bubble and the text gets separated into its own bubble:

You will notice a nice addition in 3.0 is that the screen isn’t locked with the sending progress bar anymore. The progress shows up at the top so you are free to start typing the next message, or go back and send a message in a different message thread.

I couldn’t make it happen, but when I first started using this feature I would have failed messages. I am with Rogers up here in Canada so shortly after 3.0 came out I imagine they were a bit overloaded with MMS going everywhere. When failures occur, 3.0 now shows them with a red exclamation point beside them. All you have to do is click that and hit the Retry button when it prompts. This is great because it leaves your messages there, so if it was network congestion with Rogers, I can easily leave the Messages app and come back in later and retry them.

You will notice as I did that with the image bubbles, you lose a lot of real estate in landscape mode trying to read other messages:

Of course if someone sends you a picture, it is easy to grab it. Just click on the image (it will appear as a bubble on the left, just like the senders messages) and you will get a full screen preview of the image. In the bottom left is a little icon that lets you easily save that image into your camera roll for safe keeping:

Speaking of camera roll, if you happen to be in there and looking at images and see something you want to share, there is a new option along with the Email to to send via MMS:

In the next part, I will share my experience with the tethering options found in 3.0.