A recent report estimates that camera-cell phones will outsell stand-alone digital cameras by the end of this year. In spite of the lower resolution the combination devices offer, their popularity is surging as the public votes for integration and mobility when it comes to everyday use.
One force driving the adoption of camera-cell phones is MMS — a wireless technology that supports messages including a mix of audio clips, still images, video clips, and text. By summer, all major operators in the U.S. will have MMS up and running, although interoperability and pricing details are still being developed.
The popularity of the devices is not hard to understand. Using a handset like the Nokia 3650, Motorola’s T720i, or Ericsson’s T610, users can send everything from text messages with a simple photo to entire slideshows with audio.
MMS is user-friendly in that all the media in a message is automatically encapsulated into a single file that means users can play it all at the same time. And, because the technology is software-based, rolling out the service nationwide costs carriers very little (unlike Bluetooth which costs $10 or more of hardware).
AT&T Wireless, Sprint PCS, and T-Mobile are among the major operators in the midst of deploying MMS and by summer all five big carriers in the U.S. will be offering commercial MMS. In addition, more than a dozen models of MMS phones will be available in a wide range of prices.
The presence of both many carriers and many handset manufacturers means that prices will be competitive and drop as more users adopt the technology. Initially, expect to pay the price of a stamp to send MMS but that will fall to costs similar to those of SMS. Additionally, we should look for some kind of agreement from the various carriers to allow MMS messages to be interoperable across the different hosting systems.
Also, we should expect a variety of third-party products that make MMS make real productivity sense. One such product already competing for market share is Picsel. The company, already boasting partnerships with Sony and Samsung, allows users of MMS-supporting devices to enjoy unique user interface features and to download and interact with files in widely used formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, HTML, eBook, Adobe PDF, Kanji Support, streaming video standards, and 40 graphic and image formats.
In education, MMS technology and hardware is important because it promises a robust, distributed-information environment with few media boundaries. The only obstacle is the same as with other distributed technologies — educators must develop activities and imagine teaching contexts that make use of them. Even though we can expect 70% of university students to have such devices when they arrive as freshmen within 3 years, they will have no value as tools for education if there are no learning contexts for their use.
Such contexts and activities might include –
- Interactive slide shows
- Research Scavenger Hunts
- Multimedia Weblogging
- Group Project Management
Hopefully, we will also see major educational content providers embracing MMS into their platforms as well. It is a technology that the public is adopting rapidly and that offers exciting possibilities for technology in teaching.
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as you know, Rob, I am the world’s biggest UNfan of cell phones - because of the whole synchronous thing (why on earth should I expect that my wacky schedule should match anybody else’s, or vice versa?) - but if cell phones become devices for transmitting and receiving audio files and image files (and even video files) - glory hallelujah! I really like the ideas for the educational uses you describe here: I really like the idea of letting students “embody” their experience in pictures that they take: pictures of themselves, of their dorm room, or where they study, of their friends or their pets. if students share what they see by using their cell phone to record what they are seeing, that is going to be add a dimension of embodied experience, shared physical spaces, into the online course. I think that is a great idea. a friend of mine has students do creative writing assignments by going around and writing in different parts of campus and around Norman: this kind of cell phone would let students convey the visual dimension of the assignment together with the verbal.