Australia Gets Two MMS Services

Australia's Telstra has said that it will launch its MMS service from next week for a select number of testers. Telstra Mobile Managing Director of Marketing, Ms Kathy Keele, said MMS was the next generation of SMS and would enable customers to send personalised postcards on their mobile phone. "Customers can tailor their messages with colour images and audio to portray a moment in time, share emotions and highlight personal triumphs," Ms Keele said.

"One of the advantages of this service is that messages can also be sent to a non-MMS handset where an SMS notification will be sent to the recipient advising them of how they can view the message on Telstra.com," Ms Keele said.

From next week,120 Telstra Mobile customers will commence using MMS prior to the general availability of enabled handsets in Australia. Demonstrations will be available in selected Telstra Shops from August 8th and Telstra will commercially release the Nokia 7650 handset with inbuilt camera into selected Telstra Shops from August 12th. A wider range of MMS enabled handsets will be available from late August.

Telstra will also be actively obtaining customer feedback in relation to perceived customer benefits, likely applications and pricing options.

Rival network, Optus is also planning to launch its MMS service at the end of the month, running on Nokia hardware. Beyond the launch of MMS, Nokia and Optus are also actively cooperating on future MMS application development though their joint FutureLab project.

Richard Kitts, Director of Operations, Nokia Networks said, "We are providing Optus with an MMS solution for content access as well as person-to-person mobile messaging including from handset to email, email to handset or between applications and handsets. This will help ensure that the user experience is simple and fun."

Allen Lew, Managing Director, Optus Mobile said, "...we will continue to provide Australians with access to the latest mobile technology and more importantly applications and services which are useful and relevant in their daily lives," Mr Lew said.'"

Posted to the site on 1st August 2002