T-Mobile MMS addicted to Internet Explorer on the web

 by Martin Belam, 10 August 2007

A friend sent me a picture message from the UK the other day.

It originated from the T-Mobile network, and made its way across Europe to arrive on my non-MMS enabled Vodafone network phone in Greece. It appeared as a text message with a link and a password.

I was very impressed with the whole cross-platform, cross-network, cross-national boundary operation.

Until I got to the web bit of it course.

The first thing that greeted me when I tried to login to retrieve the message was:

You are using another browser that is not Internet Explorer 6.0 or above. With the browser that you are using we cannot guarantee the full functionality of this website
20070711_t-mobile-dialogue.gif

So it seems that T-Mobile are able to devise a network system that connects with another network overseas, determines whether my phone is capable of receiving an MMS, and if it isn't, are able to generate an SMS instead containing a unique web URL and a randomly generated password.

Or, if my phone had been capable of receiving an MMS, then they would have sent me a compressed image alongside some text which would have displayed on whatever size of small-screen device I had.

But what they can't seem to do is write a simple page of standards-compliant HTML which will display an image and a line of text on a page, and guarantee that it will work outside of Internet Explorer. And there was I thinking that <p> and <img> were pretty fundamental to even the earliest versions of HTML.

1 Comment

Hey,
I found this post while looking for a solution to view an mms I got on my iPhone (on t-mobile). I can't view it on the phone, nor it's browser, nor on my Mac...

And here I am in the year 2009 and T-Mobile is not even able to support the technology they offer on their own network...

Keep up to date on my new blog