Picture Messages in SMS - Update

Found a couple of hours to check out SMS Picture Messaging last night. Using the example on the Nokia sample I can send the example picture with some text. I haven't yet managed to send my own picture, as I need to figure out how to encode the OTA bitmap.

I was thinking of creating my own editor to create the bitmap in the format that I need, but I reckon there must be ones already out there that I can use. If not I think I'll look into converting a standard monochrome bitmap to OTA format. Then I can use something like MS Paint to create the picture.

So at the moment I can sort of send a picture message. I can specify the text that I want to include anyway, and just use the "canned" picture that Nokia supply as an example. The text seems to encode properly, but I need to look into what encoding I need to be using for this to work completely.

As an experiment though I did all of this without touching Esendex's core messaging system. I sent the message through our SendWDPService Web Service that we originally implemented to allow people to send OTAP settings. The method simply takes originator and destination ports, and then some content which can be split across multiple PDUs.

The work outstanding is to figure out a way of easily encoding a picture for inclusion in the message. When that is done I'll write a more detailed explanation of how to send a Picture SMS.