Text messaging

Sometimes it’s better to message. Maybe you’re in a meeting and need to have a document forwarded from your email account now (not in five minutes), or you’ve just taken a photo of the hole in the roof and would rather show it, not explain it. Or maybe you feel a discreet message would be better than having everyone hear that you somehow forgot to put on your left shoe this morning and need someone to bring it in…

Whatever the reason, wherever you are, you now have several highly capable and refined messaging services to help get your message across.

Instant messages are short messages exchanged in real time using familiar screen names or IDs. With instant messaging, you can see who is online and available to chat, or unavailable as they’re busy or offline.

Most operators offer instant messaging with AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, with MSN providing a downloadable version of its Messenger software on all the 3G enabled networks.

SMS is the standard for today’s text message services, allowing up to 160 characters to be sent and received via your network operator's message centre, or from the internet via an SMS gateway website. If your phone is switched off or out of range, messages are stored in the receiving message centre and delivered at the next opportunity.

Despite the character restriction, messaging facilities on most of today’s handsets will simply split a very long message into chunks of 160 characters or less. A customer will be charged for sending more than one message, but there will be no effective restriction.

In the UK, EMS has been made effectively obsolete by Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) technology. Enhanced Messaging Service is halfway between SMS and MMS, allowing formatted text and the attachment of images, simple audio and animation, but restricted to an often impractical size. EMS was initially designed to provide MMS functionality on older networks.

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a new standard in mobile messaging. Like SMS, MMS is a way to send a message from one mobile to another. The difference is that MMS can include not just text, but also sound, images and video. It is also possible to send MMS messages from a mobile phone to an email address.

Formats that can be embedded within MMS include:

• Text (formatted with fonts, colours, etc)
• Images (JPEG, GIF format
• Audio (Mp3, MIDI)
• Video (MPEG)

Images can be downloaded from WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) sites, selected from a menu within the phone, or can be used to send photos taken using the phone’s built-in camera.

One of the main practical differences between MMS and SMS is that whilst SMS messages are limited to 160 bytes, an MMS message has no size limit and could be many Kbytes in size, or even larger. MMS requires a third generation (3G) network to enable such large messages to be delivered, although smaller messages can be sent with second generation networks using GPRS.

2.5G and 3G networks allow emails to be sent and received from your mobile. Most use a centralised network provided by the phone supplier although you can also send text or MMS messages to email addresses from your phone.