Paul Annett

About a month ago we upgraded my wife’s mobile phone to a Nokia 7370. Since we both send photos from our handsets to Flickr, one of the main features we had been looking for was a good camera, and the 7370’s was fairly good, though I think it was the flowery pattern that really swung the decision.

We tried out the camera and all was well (much better than my phone’s miserable excuse for a camera). Now, sending the pictures to Flickr should be easy, right?…

Wrong! Sending by photo-message doesn’t work, as the picture is larger than the Orange network’s 100k MMS filesize limit. The camera wants to shrink the picture to send it but where’s the point in upgrading to a phone with a better camera if it then shrinks the photo before sending?

Fair enough, we’ll send it by email. Except that now the phone’s saying ‘file too large to attach’. This can’t be right - Nokia encourages moblogging in it’s marketing material so you’d think it would be possible to send photos from your phone to a moblog. But no.

I spoke to a lovely helpful lady called Paula at Orange tech support, who told me it’s not a restriction put on by the network, and agreed that it would be ridiculous for the phone not to be able to send the photos it takes. Since they couldn’t fix the problem immediately, they said they’d look into it and call me back. Two weeks later Paula called to say that Orange had no documentation of a filesize limit on Nokia phones, and I should try contacting Nokia direct.

I called Nokia and they couldn’t resolve the issue either and agreed that it would be ridiculous, but “you’d be surprised how often that sort of thing comes up”. A few email exchanges later (after fishing their replies out of my junk mail folder each time), Nokia customer care confirmed that there is a filesize limit of 100k on email attachments for that phone!!

That’s ridiculous! Why have a phone which can’t send the pictures it takes? If I’d wanted to download the photos to my PC then upload them to my moblog I’D HAVE USED MY FUCKING DIGITAL CAMERA.

Apparently most Nokia phones have a 300k email attachment filesize limit, which is set because “it’s higher than the limit set by most network providers”. That seems odd, since I already know Orange don’t set a limit.

So I emailed T-Mobile, Vodafone, and O2.

T-Mobile don’t limit the filesize of email attachments, but helpfully pointed out that the larger the file the longer it would take to send, so the more risk there was of losing the connection before the send was complete.

Vodafone have yet to get back to me (I’ll update when I hear from them).

O2 are possibly the least helpful company in existance. They sent me an automated email response to tell me that my question couldn’t be answered by their automated help system (I knew this, I’d already checked it on their website), and that they don’t actually employ humans to answer customer questions so I won’t be hearing from them again.

Once I’ve collated all my results I’ll go back to Nokia to get their thoughts, and I’ll keep you updated here.