Why MMS is struggling worldwide

i-mode Business Strategy asks why has MMS failed to take off. The post has a few things that ring true with me and my experiences with my K800i and Orange.

The issue is if I sellect a handset that is aimed at heavy photo users what makes the network think I am going to cut them down just to send them to people who cannot open the file and if they do its two small to see.

If you look at what happened in the days when photography was done on film rather than digital. The user took paper copies of the photos and passed them around friends over a coffee. Now how does a mobile network think that MMS replicates such a service?

I guess that MMS might start to take off if what you are sharring is video. In this week when the kids are on half term holidays from school I am getting short films from them sent via wifi shot with my Nokia N93. This is a time shift service that allows me to be in two places at once. The success of YouTube has shown that others also see the point of sharing video. Who knows as the mobile networks get more people with 3G handsets they might just manage to relaunch MMS as they have managed to turn round the poor perception of mobile data services over the last few years.

However I think that none of these services will take off until you see data bundles sold as part of the main contract. E-Mail also needs to be rolled out in a similar manner to that which we see from Vodafone in Spain using Visto as the tool that gets the users to experience the data services.