Sony Ericsson P802 New possibilities with messaging, Examples of EMS contents and applications

For Internal Use Only	P800 Smartphone
	White Paper, May 2002

Several sounds and melodies can be inserted in one message, and they can be combined with pictures.

Pictures, animations and formatted text

Phones supporting EMS include a set of predefined pictures for inserting in SMS messages. New pictures and animations are downloaded from the Internet or received in SMS messages. Pictures can be created and edited in the phone using a built-in Picture Editor. Several pictures can be inserted in one message, and they can be combined with sounds and melodies. The users can format text in messages with different styles and sizes.

Concatenated messages

A part of the EMS standard is the support for concatenated messages, which means that the phone is able to automatically combine several messages both when creating and receiving EMS. This is useful to be able to build and display messages with rich content, since the amount of information in each SMS is limited by the SMS standards.

New possibilities with messaging

The EMS standard is now a part of the SMS standard and supported by the major network operators and mobile phone manufacturers. This universal approach enables a fast penetration and development of new services and applications within messaging.

Compatible with SMS standards

Users will find EMS as easy to use as SMS. At the moment 15 billion SMS messages, are sent every month worldwide. Roughly 80% of this traffic is user-to-user i.e. mobile phone users sending short messages to each other using the keypad of the phone to enter text. The remaining 20 % is shared by downloads and notifications of different kinds.

The Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) was first submitted to the standards committees by Ericsson. Ericsson presented the outline structure of EMS to the relevant ETSI/ 3GPP committees. The major mobile phone manufacturers and most operators are actively contributing to the 3GPP standards. Hence the EMS standards have evolved and are now stable and complete as part of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) technical specification.

An EMS message can be sent to a mobile phone that does not support EMS, or only supports part of EMS. All the EMS elements i.e. text formatting, pictures, animations and sounds are located in the message header. The EMS contents will be ignored by a receiving phone that does not support the standard. Only the text message will be displayed to the receiver. This is true consumer-friendly standardization. EMS is compatible to SMS across most of the range of mobile phones from the oldest to the newest. Some companies in the mobile phone industry have developed their own messaging technologies, which only work with their own phone models. Network operators are in favour of EMS because it is universal – many of the major mobile phone manufacturers are constructively improving and developing the EMS standards even further for implementation in their products.

Examples of EMS contents and applications

A wide range of contents, applications and services may be developed. Below is a list of examples and areas where messaging can be enhanced with EMS:

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