So apparently tomorrow, we’re finally going to get MMS on the iPhone. Assuming you have a 3G or 3GS, that is. And of course, since it’s AT&T, there’s no telling how well it will work if at all.
This represents the rare-but-not-unheard-of phenomenon of Apple guessing wrong. A lot of things that they’ve done in the last 15 years or so were good guesses, mostly regarding legacy features that could be dumped (SCSI? ADB?) or premium products marketed brilliantly (“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”) or features that could be ditched without consequence (i.e. 2009 before releasing an iPod with FM radio).
But back in the days when the iPhone was under development, I am willing to bet that Himself made a bet: that given the opportunity, people would eschew sending postage-stamp-sized pictures for a quarter a pop when they could email a full-sized pic for free. And thus MMS support didn’t make it into the iPhone. Of course, since MMS is a data service, it’s possible to cram other things in there, and once video messaging became part of the package, MMS suddenly took off.
Which left Apple in a bad spot again, because at the time, the hottest camera in phones was a 2 MP camera that still took, at best, 176×144 video. And there’s no nice way to put it: that looks like shit. And as I said two years ago, the reason the iPhone doesn’t take video is because Himself won’t let it until there’s a way for it to take video that doesn’t look like ass.
It seems that day has come – iPhone and Nano alike now take 640×480 at 30 fps, which is equivalent to standard-resolution television or the low-end Flip camera. Which is good enough for Himself. Better late than never, but the two year delay is the price of the mentality that keeps Apple in a premium price niche (and keeps the stock bumping around 180).
And so we get to the final delay: AT&T. On the day that iPhone OS 3.0 went live, with MMS capability, 29 of Apple’s 30 carrier partners were live with MMS service. Guess which one wasn’t?
And this is because unlike SMS, which rides on the control channels for free, MMS is a data service. And as we have proven over and over and over and FUCKING OVER, AT&T’s network is not up to handling the data requirements of the installed base of iPhone users. Adding an additional data capacity to the phone will only increase the load on what is already a weary and wobbly network, especially in New York and San Francisco.
The iPhone has customer satisfaction ratings that most manufacturers would sacrifice their children for, but the number-one complaint of owners – by a huge margin – is the AT&T network. And rightly so.