A little change to your iphone’s messaging plan lets you send and receive MMs messages with swirlyMMs on jailbroken phones.

The iphone does so many things quite well, making it all the more frustrating when the iphone fails to perform some normal task. Tethering, copy-and-paste, forwarding sMs...the list goes on. and sending and receiving MMs picture messages, just like on any normal phone, is another one of those frustrations.

Some people don’t want to work around their phone’s inability to receive MMs, as in they want it to “just work.” The good thing is that the iphone is very capable of it. it just takes some software and a change to the texting plan to make it work. speciically, it requires:

1. changing your cellular plan to enable Multimedia Messaging (a.k.a. picture Messaging)

2. Jailbreaking the phone

3. installing swirlyMMs

Picture Messaging, Wap, and Wap push

Wireless application protocol, or Wap, is a standard allowing phones to access the internet. Wap is used extensively on most phones that have a “wireless internet” feature. Because most phones have far less computing power than a desktop computer, this set of standards allowed web pages to be formatted for the small screen and to reduce the bandwidth necessary to deliver them.

For the protocol-minded, WAP could be considered a sort of “TCP/IP” for phones, d providing TCP-like streams through the Wireless Transaction Protocol (WTP), UDPlike data delivery through the Wireless Datagram Protocol (WDP), and a sort of “compressed HTTP” through the Wireless Session Protocol (WSP).

Wap push is a network-to-phone push protocol that sends a Wap URL to the phone for it to then retrieve automatically without user intervention sort of like texting a web address directly to the phone. The iphone was promoted as the irst phone with “real internet” and, like many advanced smartphones, was able to use the internet Tcp/ip protocols directly. subsequently, apple developed a separate push architecture for MobileMe and exchange on the iphone.

As a result, most iphone data plans do not have the “Wap push” feature enabled by default. Before you can add support for MMs, you must add Wap push to your plan, without removing access to the normal Wap gateway that the iphone uses. Typically, you can call your provider and request that it be added to your plan if you don’t already have it. if they offer to transfer you to “iphone technical support,” don’t let them, because you’re asking for a very un-iphonic thing.

The technical changes that need to be made, once you get hold of your carrier’s technical sales representative (see following section), are:

1. enable Wap push.

2. preserve both the old and new Wap gateway (i.e., don’t disable the iphone features).

3. change the texting plan to a non-iphone plan (i.e., a texting plan that supports picture messaging).

4. Leave the iphone data plan intact (allows visual voicemail to work).

5. Resend over-the-air activation messages, or oTas, to the phone.

The forums at www.swirlyspace.com have lots of data on how to conigure various worldwide GsM carriers to allow MMs.

Adding Wap push to a U.S. at&t account

although your carrier may vary, the majority of U.s. domestic iphones are on aT&T, so this hack will show you how to get it working on aT&T.

1. call 888-892-9760. navigate through the responses until you reach an operator. Validate your account credentials to their satisfaction.

2. ask to speak to a technical sales representative.

3. ask if you can please remove your iphone text messaging plan, and add the normal text messaging plan with MMs features (Wap push).

Sometimes, depending on the level of expertise of the tech support person, they may not understand the goal. one way to make it clear is to say that you want the ability to use the siM card in both an iphone and in another phone that supports picture Messaging (MMs). That way, they will know that they need to keep the iphone features working (iphone data plan, visual voicemail, and access to the iphone-speciic Wap gateways that allow Wap trafic to go to the iphone) as well as the new Wap gateways that will enable the Wap push. as an added bonus, you can now swap your siM card into other phones, as long as they are unlocked or locked to aT&T’s network.

Using SwirlyMMS

swirlyMMs (www.swirlyspace.com) can be installed with cydia on a jailbroken phone. This app allows you to send MMs pictures to phones capable of receiving them, and to receive MMs as well.

Launch swirlyMMs, and you’ll see a screen with a couple of buttons. click the settings button and enter your MMs information. You will need to contact your cellular provider, or the swirlyMMs forums, to determine the appropriate information. settings for a number of popular providers can be found on www.swirlyspace.com.

Here are settings that worked for swirlyMMs on the U.s. aT&T network:

MMsc: http://mmsc.cingular.com

proxy: wireless.cingular.com:80

apn: wap.cingular

Username: <blank>

password: <blank>

Sending MMS

After you ill out the settings, click the save button at the top left. click the new MMs button at the bottom right, and you’ll see a screen where you can compose the MMs message. You can give the message a title if you like. click the plus button to the right of the To box to select from your contacts or just type in a phone number. next, click the plus button to the right of the File: box to select a picture to send, or to take a new picture. Finally, press the send button to send the message.

Receiving MMS

Receiving MMs is just as easy. Just like the other message-related applications, swirlyMMs will tell you when a picture message has come in. at that point, MMs works just like it would on other phones. When you receive a message and click on it, swirly will fetch it and display it. From there you can use the buttons on the bottom to save the image somewhere on your iphone’s filesystem (it’s automatically copied to your photos as well), or forward it to another recipient.