Just dropping in to say hello. I've been watching this community a wee while now.
I'm involved with the specification of the next generation(s) of phones.. and one of the big things is the development in text messaging. There are two main strands to this: EMS and MMS. MMS is sufficiently far off for me not to talk/worry about, but EMS is important because it could impact the way web forms take input for text messages.
EMS supports:
- Left, center or right alignments of text, normal, large or small font sizes and normal, bold, italic, underlined or strikethrough text
- Three picture formats - small (16 by 16 pixels), large (32 by 32 pixels) or variable sized pictures (recommended maximum size of 96 by 64 pixels), B&W pictures only
- 10 different predefined sounds including low and high chimes and chords, Ding, TaDa, Claps, Drum and Notify. User defined sounds are possible which can be transferred via iMelody
- Moving pictures will be supported by EMS, in two sizes, small (8 by 8 pixels) and large (16 by 16 pixels), with built-in types including sadness, flirtatiousness, gladness, skepticism and grief. User-defined animations will be possible too
Now, handsets supporting EMS will become available pretty soon (I think Ericsson already ship phones supporting it), and it requires very little work on the operator's part to enable. It's also very standard. This could lead to more HTML-entry SMS gateways.. or something new and different. It's worth being aware of, though.
Hope some of you find that of interest :)
