Craptacular Service
While I was fooling around with the Treo last night I sent an MMS over to Russ to test out the setup. Russ is the only person I use MMS with normally, so it’s a good control test for the system. He gets the message no problem, but the reply he sends doesn’t make it back to my phone. We were chatting via IM as we did this, otherwise I would have had no idea he sent a message. Not a big deal, MMS is actually an IP based service, and I probably need to do manual setup of the 650 to get it working on the TMobile network. But when I got up this morning I swapped my SIM back into the 6600 before Elle and I headed out. We went wandering around for the morning, picked up some groceries and ran some errands, visited her father, and were here checking email. New message on my phone, it’s the MMS that Russ sent, I had completely forgotten about it. This is about 4 hours after I swapped my SIM back into the 6600. It took that long to get the message out of whatever holding place it was in and on to my phone. I can’t believe that. I find that service level completely useless for a “messaging service”. My conclusion, I think, is that Russ and I might be the only people using MMS. I don’t think anyone else would tolerate that kind of behavior in a system. There should be all kinds of yelling and screaming going on.
Are you a carrier wondering why MMS hasn’t seen great uptake? It’s because it doesn’t fricking work you morons. Try testing it out in real world situations (that means cross carrier, despite what you might think people do have friends using other networks) and get it to work. Especially if you think this is going to be a high cost service. I think you’re completely cracked if you think you’re gonna be able to charge twenty five cents per message! But if you really want to, not only should it get there reliably and immediately, it should be retouched to make me look slimmer and more attractive and I should always be featured in glamorous locations. If you can’t do that then don’t think it’s going to see wide adoption at that price. Jeeze TMobile, the network is live, but there’s no one home. No EDGE, horrendous services, spotty coverage, a billing system that defines “automatic payment” in a way that I would consider anything but automatic. It looked so good when you picked up the Sidekick. You seemed to be getting a clue about the whole integrated services aspect. But now I’m going to have to go back to Cingular. I didn’t want to, but you’re really forcing my hand here. I just hope they don’t remember me at the Cingular store, there was some “unpleasantness” before I moved over to TMobile. I might not be welcome there.