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.

User-to-user message

Messages usually originating from the keypad of a mobile phone can include pictures, melodies, formatted text with EMS.

T300/T302

White Paper, August 2002

Voice and e-mail notifications

Notifying mobile phone users that they have new voice or fax mail messages waiting - including icons or melodies with EMS.

Unified messaging

The user typically receives a short message notifying them that they have a new message in their unified messaging box, with icons or formatted text further enhancing the message.

Internet e-mail alerts

An Internet e-mail alert is provided in the form of a short message that typically details the sender of the email, the subject field and first few words of the email message, and in this case formatted text is excellent to identify mesage elements.

Ring signals

Downloading ring signals from the Internet.

News & commercials

World news illustrated, sports scores and news headlines, finance and stock market news with diagrams and tickers, commercial product promotions, weather reports with maps, tunes from TV commercials as ring signals.

Info & entertainment

Ring signals, e-greetings, football club logo, joke-of-the-day illustrated by pictures or sound, horoscopes, movie related animation or theme song, TV show promotions, music artist promotions, lottery results, food and drinks pictures and recepies, mood-related pictures.

Corporate

Flight schedules, preinstalled corporate logos, map snippets and travel info, company branded icons and ring signals, corporate e-mail notifications, affinity programmes where companies notify customers of product updates etc, banks notifying customers about new services and interest rates, call centres providing answers to questions about a product, vehicle positioning combining EMS with Global Positioning System (GPS) position information, job dispatch with delivery addresses for sales or courier package delivery, using EMS in a retail environment for credit card authorization, remote monitoring of machines for service and maintenance purposes.