Press News

Budapest, April 22, 2003

A year ago Westel customers were the first in the world to make use of a fully-fledged commercial-scale MMS service. This opened a new era in mobile communication, where the visual also has a role in info-communication. The MMS, which was launched as the forerunner of third generation multimedia services, is becoming more and more popular. Over the past year, Westel customers using the company's picture news service have received over 800 000 MMS messages with news on the weather, the stock market, name days and other topics.

On the afternoon of April 8, 2002 - after several months of preparation, Westel and Ericsson technicians launched a new multimedia messaging service - the MMS. With this state-of-the-art technology, Westel customers can send picture or voice from one mobile phone to another. Taking and using pictures, they can choose a more interesting and far more colorful form of communication than ever before available. With the world premiere of the MMS, Westel has reinforced that it make services and technologies, as yet unknown in the Hungarian market, available to its customers as quickly as possible.
Previously, the spread of the service was hindered by the lack of availability of appropriate, color-display MMS sets. In the last year, however, significant development took place in this field as well. Currently, Westel offers 13 different models of color display MMS sets, and most of them (with the help of built-in or add-on cameras) are also able to create digital photos.
The range of cheaper MMS telephones is continually expanding, and by now over 23,000 Westel customers are using color-display mobile phones suitable for sending and receiving pictures, and interest in the new camera-equipped Samsung V200 mobile phone is far greater than expected.
MMS telephones contribute to the transformation of mobile communication, with visual images playing a growing role alongside voice and SMS communication. The significance of picture communication can demonstrated by the fact that last year as part of the MMS news service, those customers who have sets suitable for picture transmission received nearly 800,000 infoMMS messages, which Westel, uniquely among the service providers, tailors according to the mobile phone. These infoMMS messages carried information on topics including, among others, the expected weather, the stock market, and name days. In conjunction with the MMS service, Westel customers may access the Multimedia album, may forward their MMS messages, automatically copy them, or download MMS greeting cards from the 777mobile internet site and send them to their friends and loved ones.