When firmware 2.0 came around for the iPhone, it wasn’t such an easy decision for me or most of my colleagues to upgrade. Part of the reason was that we would lose the ability to send and receive MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) via a jailbroken app called SwirlyMMS.

Still, the allure of so-called “Push” Microsoft Exchange email and calendar support was too much to deny. So, we have been living without MMS for a while. Earlier this week, a company called Juicecaster released their “MMS” software, Flutter. As it turns out, it wasn’t real MMS but rather an MMS alternative that allowed us to share pictures with anyone in our contacts list. It’s great, but it’s not real MMS.

Browsing around in Cydia today, I discovered that SwirlyMMS is now upgraded to version 1.2, and it supports iPhones with firmware 2.0 and above! Naturally, I immediately installed it to check it out.

Having used SwirlyMMS before, it wasn’t difficult to configure. I knew all the MMS settings for my mobile operator, though SwirlyMMS now has a “Request Auto Setting” feature. It would be interesting to find out how that works. I tested sending and receiving MMS — both worked flawlessly. If you receive an MMS with a photo in it, you can save the photo to your iPhone.

Swirly MMS, MMS client for iPhone 2.1

SwirlyMMS is not free. You can try it out for 14 days, after which you have to fork out US$8 to continue using it. In my opinion, most people can live with that price, because we get a full-featured MMS client. When I think about it, though, it seems like a big omission for a modern mobile phone not to support MMS out of the box.

Let’s hope Apple eventually supports MMS natively, perhaps integrated into their SMS client. In the meantime, SwirlyMMS will fill in the gap quite well.

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Filed under: iPhone • Mobile Software

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