Kelli Williamson

Kelli Williamson, Nokia's business development manager, said the main advantage of MMS over existing technologies like WAP is its flexibility of data display.She described an example of a push application: "As a business person, you might subscribe to stock quotes via MMS and throughout the day receive text and graphical messages showing how they are performing," she said, adding that although WAP also can display stock quote information with graphics, MMS gives developers more control over presentation."The information is laid out differently [between the two]; you can be a lot more creative with MMS than with WAP."Supported media file types include JPEG, GIF, text and AMR voice.

Another advantage of MMS, Williamson said, is the ability to push data to devices."With MMS, you as the end user don't have to do a lot of initiation yourself; the information comes to you if you've asked for it.With WAP, maybe you remember to [pull] your important information, and maybe you don't."More than static screens, MMS lets developers push interactive screens to users, Williamson said, which can be filled out in the field and returned to a back-end system, for example."I saw a golf game in which players factor in distance to the hole, wind speed and direction when selecting their club and making a shot."That info is processed by a server with shot results returned to the player."The same interaction can be applied to enterprise-type applications," she said.

While that might sound great in theory, currently there are no U.S. carriers offering the service, which requires the addition of Multimedia Message Service Center (MMSC) software to a carrier's network."There are operators in Europe that have commercially released MMS [systems], and we are in trials in the U.S. with operators," Williamson said.