Hong Kong took one small step towards the world of third-generation (3G) mobile telephony this week, as CSL launched the world's first commercial multimedia messaging service (MMS).
Note the word commercial. Norway's Telenor got in a few weeks ahead, but its service only begins charging next month. Still, it never hurts to be first, and the announcement makes 1010 and One2Free the first mobile-phone brands in Asia to offer the system.
But apart from the prestige of beating everyone else to it, what else does CSL gain? Very little. MMS, as the name implies, is a system for sending text, sound and even video from one phone to another. In theory, a user should be able to film a short video and copy it to a phone through Bluetooth, add a couple of subtitles or a voice-over, and send it. You can even send and receive MMS messages from your desktop or (eventually) digital TV. As a bonus for content providers, MMS features digital rights management, so users who subscribe to content services will not be able automatically to forward the latest cartoon or pop tunes to people.
As MMS is an open standard using wireless application protocol (WAP), it should not even be restricted by the recipient's choice of phone network. Finally, MMS uses a store and forward system, meaning a message is received by a network's service centre and forwarded directly to the recipient's phone - unlike e-mail, which waits on a server to be collected, people will get the message wherever they are.
Present messaging systems - short-messaging service (SMS) and extended messaging service (EMS) - have numerous inherent problems. SMS only really arrived in Hong Kong last year but in many countries it has already overtaken voice in the affection of its users.
According to the GSM Association, mobile-phone users sent more than a billion text messages per day last year.