MMS vs E-Mail

NOTE: I’m going to do my best to not make this strictly about the iPhone…no promises, though.

After Apple released the iPhone, the complaints rolled in about it not having MMS (or Multimedia Messaging Service), as if it were absolutely necessary.  Which is ridiculous considering that most complaints about the iPhone came from the BlackBerry community (whom, up until recently, didn’t have 3G or a good MMS system themselves, so I don’t even know what they were complaining about) who’s phones were supposed to be used strictly for business…right?

Here’s the fun fact: e-mail and MMS do the same thing. There is no REAL difference. The biggest differences are that MMS works like SMS in that you can just input the recipient’s phone number and you’re good to go, and with MMS you’re limited on file sizes or the amount of information you can send.

That’s pretty much where it all ends. However, with e-mail, you’re able to have a hard copy on your computer, or wherever you might go and access your e-mail, thus making it much more portable than MMS itself. Of course, you could save the MMS attachment to your phone, and then send it via bluetooth to your computer, or maybe even forward the MMS to your e-mail. Which would be, in turn, pointless to boot, when it could have just been e-mailed straight to you.

A couple years ago, one could make the argument that not all phones have an e-mail capability. Which was true back then, but now, chances are that the phone that you’ve got in your pocket/hand/desk is ready to send and receive e-mails on the fly.

Now, don’t get me wrong, sending an MMS to a friend is much faster than sending them an e-mail, but it’s a whole different ball park when we’re in that much need for instant gratification than to wait a few minutes for an e-mail to come in.But when you’re limited to .5MB of data, and cameras are getting higher in quality on phones, you can’t really send much of anything good over MMS to youtube/facebook or whatever social media site you might be thinking of.