T-Mobile MMS addicted to Internet Explorer on the web

A friend sent me a picture message from the UK the other day.

It originated from the T-Mobile network, and made its way across Europe to arrive on my non-MMS enabled Vodafone network phone in Greece. It appeared as a text message with a link and a password.

I was very impressed with the whole cross-platform, cross-network, cross-national boundary operation.

Until I got to the web bit of it course.

The first thing that greeted me when I tried to login to retrieve the message was:

You are using another browser that is not Internet Explorer 6.0 or above. With the browser that you are using we cannot guarantee the full functionality of this website

So it seems that T-Mobile are able to devise a network system that connects with another network overseas, determines whether my phone is capable of receiving an MMS, and if it isn't, are able to generate an SMS instead containing a unique web URL and a randomly generated password.

Or, if my phone had been capable of receiving an MMS, then they would have sent me a compressed image alongside some text which would have displayed on whatever size of small-screen device I had.

But what they can't seem to do is write a simple page of standards-compliant HTML which will display an image and a line of text on a page, and guarantee that it will work outside of Internet Explorer. And there was I thinking that <p> and <img> were pretty fundamental to even the earliest versions of HTML.

Posted by Martin Belam, August 10, 2007
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