Its all coming together, says Ian Harris, analyst with Mobilestreams, coming back from the yearly 3GSM even held in Cannes last week
“This time next year there will be a lot of deployment live with the end to end network, phones and services all widely available. 3GSM marked the “beginning of the rainbow” in terms of MMS deployments”
The analysts shares a summary of the main important updates
TERMINALS
· Motorola showed A820 and its MMS terminals portfolio · Several exciting new MMS devices and MMS accessories from Ericsson are likely to be at CeBIT · Ericsson confirmed that the T68 EMS versions that are shipping now will be flash upgradeable to support MMS. Ericsson is to be heartily congratulated for kick starting the MMS market by 6 months by allowing existing devices to be upgraded rather than forcing people to buy a new phone · Motorola will support MMS SMIL, joining Nokia, Ericsson and Siemens in supporting a single content creation and presentation format
MMSCS
· Bouygues Telecom chose Comverse for its MMSC and added CMG alongside Sema for its SMSC roster · MTN South Africa are trailing Logica’s MMSC, as are 15 network operators · Materna and Mobilkom Austria are trailing MMS · Several new MMSC vendors entered the already crowded market: mi4e of Sweden, Tornado Development of the US, First Hop of Finland, TCS of the USA · The Glenayre Versera MMSC will be ready to start to deploy in 2003 · Lucent are reselling the Logica MMSC plus other platforms still to be announced · Nortel are reselling CMG’s WAP Gateway, Logica’s SMSC and Comverse’s MMSC · SchlumbergerSema are integrating the Vimatix transcoding solution into their MMSC · Interoperability was strong but Sema and Openwave were not part of the programme
APPLICATIONS
· WhiteCell expanded its anti-spam software from SMS to MMS (www.white-cell.com) · Beep Science announced it was supplying a pre-DRM copyright control solution to Telenor Norway for MMS (www.beepscience.no) · Mobixell Networks of Israel showed impressive image, video and audio transcoding solutions for MMS (www.mobixell.com) · Superscape showed its Swerve 3D messaging technology on the Nokia 7650 and 8210 (www.superscape.com) · Picsel showed its Interactive File Viewer (www.picsel.com) · ConVISUAL’s Photo Community with MMS was unveiled · Aspiro unveiled MMS services including soap operas, tarot cards, cocktail recipes and photo gallery · Bitfone left the MMS space to focus on firmware over the air upgrades · Atchik of France came out with the Kama Sutra and Love Oracle MMS applications · ImageDropbox from Xpedio allows image translation