Through the fog... What future photo messaging?

Kicking off a new series exclusive to silicon.com, Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom this week aims to peer through the hype and the marketingese surrounding multimedia phone messaging...

OK - Christmas is over. You've been given your brand new mobile phone and you've (eventually) figured out how to take photos on it. You took it to the New Year's Eve party and sent off photos to everyone you know - it was free to do and the photos were hilarious!

Well, they were at the time. The problem is that you can't really remember what you were taking photos of. But hey - that's part of the fun.

You've received a few strange calls from some friends, many of whom were asking why they have received a message from you asking them to go to their PC, connect to the internet and then look at some infantile photos of someone they've never seen before mooning. At least that's what they believe it is - the quality of the photo is so poor, it could be a picture of the moon itself on a foggy night.

Now you're back at work and you have more than a few emails from others who have had the honour of receiving one of your missives - most have attached the photo so you can see it yourself. Some seem to think them funny - others wonder what kind of drink or other stuff you might have been on.

So - a mixed response. Let's now wind forward a few months. Your provider has removed the free messaging function. Your friends have stopped smiling sympathetically at you every time you send a message and have politely asked you not to bother them any more - the gimmick is wearing a bit thin. Your parents are asking for photos of the new baby, making it slightly easier to differentiate him from Winston Churchill after a heavy night out. Even your other half, who you have to leave when you work away from home, is not enamoured by the blurred pictures of you in the shower that you insist on sending.

Does this mean photo messaging dead? Well, no. There will be areas where it can be a useful tool in a professional sense, such as for insurance assessors who need to get a general idea of a problem back to the main office very rapidly, or&. well, where else, really?

For estate agents? The quality is too poor and a cheaper digital camera gives better results. And an estate agent has no need for the immediacy offered by the messaging function.

Journalists? Yes, they often need the immediacy but the quality of the picture is laughable for a serious print. They'll stick with top end digital cameras and use a standard mobile phone as a data access point.

Kids made SMS successful, so surely they will do the same with MMS? Er - with SMS they can impart some information to someone quickly and at a known, low cost. With MMS, they can impart a poor quality picture to someone at a price that may end up with their parents removing the phone from them.

The operators will counter the above with figures showing MMS messaging through Christmas and the New Year exceeding expectations and, if it continues in said vein, there will be more MMS messages sent by Easter than all the SMS messages since time began (or something like that).

The problem here is that usage figures for MMS will look good to start off with - as did WAP (remember that?). If you've just bought/been given a phone capable of this new whiz-bang technology you'll give it a go, and sure, it will seem whiz-bang for a few goes. Then it begins to seem less whiz-bang, more whee-phutt, then splutter, then possibly phhrrrp.

The spike of usage will definitely look good, based on the number of MMS capable handsets that seem to have been shipped out for Christmas. Let's wait until the Easter figures are in before we start heralding the new saviour of the mobile operator market.

As time goes on, the quality of the in-built cameras will improve - but this will mean larger file sizes. Unless the operators can take their existing plans for combined offerings (voice, data, SMS and MMS at fixed costs, either per month or per transaction) and come up with something that enables people to send three million pixel pictures to each other rapidly and at low cost, image-based MMS will be flash in the pan.

Also, not everyone will want to pay the extra for all the gubbins involved in building in a good quality camera. The weight factor? Try taking a lifestyle phone weighing in at under 100g and adding a good quality camera while keeping the weight under 200g.

But, there is Bluetooth, you say. Bluetooth-enabled phones are already available and are showing their strengths in the business world where the phone can talk to a laptop without wires, enabling the laptop user to send and receive emails or browse the web using the phone as a data modem. This would seem to be the future for image transfer to others - a thumbnail of the image can be viewed on the mobile phone - but a high-definition version would also be available for viewing and printing on other devices.

So, is MMS dead before it starts? By no means - just don't let the operator hype of it all being photo-based let you get carried away.

The use of MMS for enhanced messaging - where voice, image and text can be interplayed to provide a more complete message for the recipient - will come but this will need further changes to the devices, will require changes to the way the operators market their offerings and will need users to understand that while a picture paints a thousand words, it may cost as much as a million. Yet a carefully crafted message consisting of picture with a backing track and some spoken words finished off with a quick written text can create a keepsake.

**Quocirca is a leading, user-facing analyst house known for its focus on the 'big picture'. For a full summary of its activities see www.quocirca.com, or reach the company's founding directors by emailing quocirca@silicon.com.