Apple iPhone - Reviews, Hacks, Modding, Tips

Along with many other things, lack of MMS was a huge controversy when the iPhone was released. Many thought a phone that was supposed to be considered next generation should be able to send basic media such as images and movies. These complaints have now been heard by the Apple community. As of December 5th, 2007 a 3rd party application has been released to add partial MMS support to your iPhone.

The current release out doesn't have full MMS support. In its current state you can only send picture messages, not receive them. Of course you can't send them to anyone else who has an iPhone. The current version of Swirly doesn't support movies at all.

Installation of the Swirly software is easy. Simply download and extract the zipped file. Lastly, change the file permission so the binary is able to execute. You will have to configure basic settings as well.

In the future the developers plan to release a version that can both send and receive picture messages (MMS). There will also be a setting to adjust the image size when sending out pictures. Currently the images are automatically resized to a pre-determined dimension before you send the file.

From my perspective, early versions of this software are a bit rough around the edges. However, it's definitely better than no MMS functionality at all. In the future when it's able to support sending and receiving, it will be much more usable. When apple releases the upcoming SDK kit, it's plausible there will be updates to the iPhone to include MMS.