Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World, 2nd Edition

13.7 MULTIMEDIA MESSAGING (MM)

Here we shall examine a brief overview of the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). This is so we can consider alternative delivery mechanisms to the web-centric approach we have looked at so often in this book, even though MMS and web technologies are closely related, which is not surprising.

The push paradigm is clearly a powerful part of mobile service considerations, and it is almost unique to mobility, although we could pretend that email is effectively a push technology in one sense. However, the power of push technology in the mobile context is its immediacy, given that we carry our mobile devices with us most of the time. Thanks to the intimate relationship with a mobile device, it is possible to interrupt the user at any time with information that may be of use to them. In this chapter, we have been building both the ‘business case’ and technological framework for being interrupted by location-sensitive events, even making the claim that the ability to monitor and notify events in this context is probably a key enabling resource in a mobile network. Its importance cannot be overstated, which is why we have dedicated this entire chapter to examining this aspect of the RF network alone, in isolation, and its close ties to the other networks in our mobile network model.

The ability to send a text message is commonplace and barely needs explaining, other than our earlier glance at the ability for our application to interface with the text-messaging ...