Last Wednesday, Apple released their software update 3.0 for the iPhone 3G. With the update, users can enjoy a lot of new features including MMS. Anynone owning an unlocked version of the iPhone should be able to enjoy MMS, because it’s not very simple to get things working properly. End-users with an iPhone tied to the original operator get the right settings automatically through iTunes. However, an estimated 27% of iPhone 3G users don’t get these settings automatically. They have unlocked their device in the past 12 months or have imported a SIM lock free device from the USA, Belgium, Switzerland or Italy. This allows them to use the phone in combination with an operator or MVNO of their choice. But, any change in settings needs to be configured manually instead of through iTunes.

We have been supporting the first iPhone and iPhone 3G for most of our customers, helping end-users to configure their device for mobile internet running on a GSM, EDGE or UMTS network as well as Wifi. As soon as the new iPhone release became available Wednesday, we installed the update and started testing MMS. A “thank you” to the teams at our customers BASE, KPN and Rabo Mobiel for jointly demistifying MMS.
After some trial-and-error, back-and-forth, we noticed two distinct differences in configuring the iPhone 3G for MMS:
1. The proxy port needs to be added to the proxy address (e.g. 10.100.100.100:50). The majority of mobile phones have a separate field for this, but with the iPhone it needs to be “attached” to the IP-address.
2. While many mobile operators and MVNOs do not require a user name and password for internet or MMS authentication (this is done through MSISDN), the iPhone does not accept empty fields. Some value needs to be entered, any value is fine.
Upon entering these values, a full restart of the device is required to make the MMS functionality visible. Official Apple support for unlocked phones is not (yet) available to our knowledge. For the Netherlands and Belgium, the iPhoneclub blog wrote an article about MMS settings and pointed their readers to the Qelp applications for the various operators we support.

Apple seems to leave this type of configuration support to mobile operators. This will have to change at some point in time we think, since 2-year contracts will expire and end-users will start switching networks. Roughly 25% of end-users “churn” to different networks annually, so continued success of the iPhone will imply a growing support problem for mobile operators and MVNOs. Obviously, we are here to help with web applications in HTML or Flash If you are interested, please check this demo instruction for the iPhone or feel free to contact us for detailed information.