Multimediocre Adoption

With the U.S. wireless industry continuing its headlong rush into the mass consumer applications market — often at the expense of developing solutions for the mobile enterprise — it's probably too late to ask the following question, but here goes: Does the general public really even care about multimedia messaging? The current answer would seem to be a resounding no. A recent survey conducted by U.K. market research company NOP on mobile trends in Great Britain (where traditional text messaging is roughly as popular as David Beckham, Prince William and Big Ben combined) found that 83% of mobile phone users have yet to use MMS, even though 65% of the focus group (which comprised 771 mobile subscribers aged 15 or older) own MMS-compatible handsets. Perhaps most remarkable of all, 17% of respondents claimed they didn't know how to use MMS. The same NOP survey did find that mobile entertainment content is slowly catching on, with 27% of respondents saying they have downloaded music clips while 14% have dialed up sports clips. But the harsh reality is that if multimedia services are failing to catch fire in Britain, the adoption curve will prove even steeper here in the U.S., where even basic SMS is still an afterthought for most wireless subscribers. MMS simply does not represent the logical evolution from SMS that so many observers once predicted. If anything, most mobile users seem more interested in the mobilization of desktop-based forms of text communication, like e-mail or instant messaging. Sure, there probably are enough new parents in the world to guarantee a small but loyal consumer base for photo messaging. But given the choice between the picture and its proverbial analogue (the 1000 words), the majority of wireless users will continue selecting the latter — at least for the foreseeable future.