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2 Jul Sending MMS from an Android phone

Sending MMS from Android phones is not always easy. This blogpost walks you through your device configuration.

Unlike voice or sms, mms is not automatically configured in your phone. To use the service you need to enter complex technological parameters. If you're not interested in that, just skip to the settings.

MMS is using the data capability of your phone to send attachments together with sms messages. The protocol defines how images, soundclips and tekst can be combined. You can even create a sort of slideshow, if your phone supports it. MMS never became the big success that telco's hoped for and is today largely superseded by internet connectivity on mobile phones. Most people prefer instant messaging and online photo services over mms. But mms remains useful to send pictures to people who don't own a smartphone yet.

To send an MMS, your phone needs a connection to a server that is called "mmsc". You can very much compare this with an email server. The second thing you need is a connection to reach that server. For some reason most operators don't accept mms over the default internet connection of the phone. Therefore you need to configure a second connection and somehow tell the phone to use that connection for mms and another connection for internet. For some operators this second connection goes over an older protocol called WAP. In this case, you will need to enter a wap gateway address in your phone, together with the correct wap version number and port number. You also need to ensure that the size of the mms your phone is trying to send does not exceed the maximum size supported by your mmsc server. Usually this can also be configured in your phone.

When you want to receive mms, all of these settings also need to be correct. To avoid mms messages being delivered to users who have not configured their phone, the network will only deliver the messages if it is certain that your mms settings are configured. The network knows your settings are correct when you have successfully sent an mms in the past. So you will never receive an mms before you send an mms yourself. This can be very tricky if you are testing your settings. If the network decides it will not deliver the mms, it will store the mms on a webserver and send you a link to the message by sms, allowing you to retrieve the message that was sent to you using a computer.

Now that we clarified how mms is working, let's take a look at the mms settings for Mobile Vikings:

If you want to configure this in an Android device like the Nexus One, you will find that it doesn't work. The reason is that your phone cannot distinguish the mms connection from the internet connection. The solution is that you manually need to type the word "mms" in the "connection type" field in the APN settings. In the internet APN, you need to type "default" in the "connection type" field. This is undocumented and has led to the believe mms is not possible for some users.

To make sure you succeed, below are screenshots from the correct and working mms settings on the Nexus One. If you're going to send large pictures make sure to use the application "Handcent SMS" from the Marketplace instead of the built in sms client. This application will automatically resize your pictures to the correct size.

Configuration on Android

First, you need to go to your APN settings:
settings -> wireless&networks -> Mobile Networks -> Access Point Names.

As a reference, here are the settings to send MMS with Mobile Vikings:

When you already configured internet access, you will see an entry like "web", "mobile internet", "mobile vikings" or whatever name you chose for your internet apn. Click this and check if your settings correspond to what you see in the two screenshots below: (note: you probably don't have the "default" in the "APN type" field. You need to type this in manually)

Now comes the part where you enter the MMS data. Using the menu button, choose "new apn" and type in the data you see in the next two screenshots. Again, make sure to manually type in "mms" as "APN type" as seen at the bottom in the second screenshot.

Happy texting!