So it was this week that WPCentral ran an informative piece about a new issue with MMS in some Windows Phone 7 devices in Europe. This issue never would have been discovered in the United States, since the problems have to do with unlocked phones, something that is almost non-existent here in the U.S. While companies like Best Buy and Radio Shack sell unlocked phones, the use case here in America is extremely limited, since phones don't typically work across the myriad of technologies and frequencies used here.
It appears that consumers in Europe have bought unlocked Windows Phones, only to realize that their ability to send MMS is disabled. Further investigation revealed that the feature that would allow this functionality in unlocked devices, Automatic Data Configuration, was disabled by default. What this means is that when a phone boots up or a new SIM is inserted, the phone doesn't go through the process of enabling MMS through the data provided by that SIM card. The only way to enable MMS in some cases is to do a hard reset of the phone with the new SIM in, which is an incredibly big burden to expect consumers to bear, especially considering that this is never an issue with unlocked iPhones or Android phones in most cases.
Now, a hard reset is required only some of the time, because some companies try to provide their customers with the ability to get around this. HTC has a connection manager in their app store that will allow users to configure their device in a relatively painless manner. The parties who deserve a world of shame heaped on them are Microsoft and Samsung. On their own support forums, Microsoft issued a statement that the only fix is to hard reset the phone. In a sense, you can appreciate the difficult position Microsoft is in here, as they license their software for manufacturers and carriers to use and can reasonably expect those companies to be able to sort out the issues. In fact, HTC already has with their connection manager. Still, this is a technical issue that could have been addressed in licensing and one that Apple and Google have not had to face. Microsoft is responsible for some of the experience here and are letting down their customers in the least responsible manner.
It's Samsung, however, who provides the real entertainment in this story. Samsung has not provided a way around this for consumers, and issued this statement on Twitter through their @SamsungService account:
@colinbowern Samsung Phones are designed to use with a specific carrier and that modification and changing of settings is not supported.^Sab
In so many ways, this sums up what Samsung is all about. Samsung has traditionally been, along with LG, the carrier most likely to bend to the will of carriers at any point. Their phones have never differentiated themselves as Samsung phones more than individual carrier phones. The recent success of the Galaxy S line is due largely in part to Samsung's excellent Super AMOLED screen technology, but also to Samsung having a close enough relationship with carriers that they could launch the device across all four networks in the U.S. What was amazing, though, was just how much these phones, that were supposedly the same device, were all different depending on what the carrier wanted. The most egregious example, of course was Samsung allowing Verizon to strip out Google services and replace them with Bing on the Fascinate.
Providing a better product is clearly not something Samsung would prefer to fight for. Samsung's customer has never been consumers or end-users. It has always been the carriers. At the launch of the Bing-laden Samsung Continuum, a Samsung product manager admitted as much to Engadget's Nilay Patel. According to Patel on the Engadget Podcast:
I was talking to Samsung and Verizon about Bing… about who made the decision to put Bing on it and the Samsung guy looked at me and said, "Well, let's be honest here. We're an OEM. We make phones for Verizon. They're our customer."
And they are. As embarrassing as that admission is, Samsung has traditionally been the worst smartphone manufacturer in providing updates for their phones. Mid-level Android phones are always the most vulnerable, but Samsung has been disturbingly slow in getting Android 2.2 to its high-end Galaxy S line. For them, and for the carriers, it's much better to just release a new phone, and the broken-dam flood of phones through the FCC every Friday is a testament to that. This MMS issue is more of a fine point on the disregard Samsung seems to have for consumers. The unfortunate thing is that Samsung is capable of such good phone hardware and makes so many other good products for consumers. They've made the first real iPad competitor in the Galaxy Tab. One would hope that they would take more responsibility for their position in the marketplace, but there doesn't seem to be any indication of them doing so. With Samsung, it's buyer beware, and most buyers aren't Verizon and Sprint.