P800/P802

White Paper, January 2003

An MMS message can contain one or more of the following:

Text

Much larger amounts of text can be used in MMS messages when compared with SMS. Thousands of characters can be included in a message.

Audio

MMS provides the ability to send and receive recorded audio and polyphonic sounds in messages. Not only can users share a favourite song or ring signal with a friend, they can also use the mobile phone to record sound and send it along with a message. Because sound includes speech as well as music, this extra dimension of an MMS message makes for enhanced immediacy of expression and communication. Rather than sending a downloaded birthday jingle in EMS, for example, a user can send a clip of his or her own personal rendition of “Happy Birthday”.

Pictures

With the built-in CommuniCam, users can take a snapshot and immediately send it using the ‘Send As MMS’ facility. The ability to send pictures is one of the most exciting attributes of MMS, as it allows users to share meaningful moments with friends, family and colleagues.

Mobile picture transmission also offers inestimable utility in business applications, from sending on-site pictures of a construction project to capturing and storing an interesting design concept for later review. The ability to put text and pictures in a message allows users to create their own electronic postcards, an application that is expected to substantially cut into the traditional postcard-sending market.

The P800 supports the following image formats for MMS: GIF (including animated), JPEG, PNG, WBMP and BMP. Images may also be edited during message creation.

Video

The P800 can play MPEG4 video clips attached to MMS messages. They are opened as an attachment and played in the Video Player. Note that the MMS message is closed and control is transferred to the Video Player.

PIM Objects

With MMS in the P800, it is easy to send and receive business cards (vCard), Calendar and Tasks entries (vCal) and Jotter notes (text content is added to a slide). Received PIM objects are listed under the ‘Attachments’ tab.

SMIL presentations

SMIL stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language and is pronounced “smile”. SMIL in the P800 allows the user to the create and transmit multiple-slide style presentations on the mobile device. SMIL is an advanced XML-based protocol, and Sony Ericsson MMS supports a subset of this protocol. Using a simple media editor, users can incorporate audio and animated GIFs along with still images, animations and text to assemble full multimedia presentations. The idea of SMIL is to allow the user to customize the page timing in slide presentations. The user can decide in which order the image and text will be displayed, as well as for how long the images and text lines are to be shown in the display. The user never sees the underlying SMIL code and does not need to understand it.

The P800 has an implementation of SMIL 2.0 Basic Profile. Messages created by the P800 use a subset of SMIL as defined in the Conformance Specification (see below).

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