Slow uptake of mobile multimedia

Few people are making use of multimedia functionality, despite increased sales of hi-tech phones.

According to Continental Research, 36% of British camera phone users have never sent a multimedia message (MMS), up from 7% in 2003. This is despite the fact that, during the same period, the numbers of camera phones in the UK more than doubled to 7.5 million.

Furthermore, 29% of people questioned by Continental Research said they were technophobes that tended to shy away from innovation, while only 11% regarded themselves as technically savvy enough to send a picture or video message.

Another possible reason for the lack of MMS sent is the fact that mobile phone operators cap the number of messages that can be circulating at any one time for fear of overwhelming the system, reports BBC.

MozSource, the independent company that operates the Mozilla Store and the Netscape Store, has launched its technical support service for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla 1.7.

A team of technicians at http://support.mozsource.com will provide end-user e-mail support for the Firefox Web browser, the Thunderbird e-mail client and the Mozilla 1.7 Internet suite. The support service is available for $4.99 (R30) per incident, reports LinuxElectrons.

According to MozSource CEO Bart Decrem, Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0 have received a positive reception from millions of users. "We hope that our support offerings will provide prospective consumer and business users with the assurance that help will be available when they need it."

Samsung has developed a new flash memory card format derived from the MultiMedia Card (MMC) format.

The MMCmicro cards measure 12 x 14 x 1.1mm, roughly a quarter the size of a normal MMC card. The cards are designed to operate at either 1.8 or 3.3 volts of power, Infosyncworld reports.

MMCmicro has been designed for low-power, low-space devices such as mobile phones, but can still achieve 10MBps read and 7MBps write speeds, with a 26MBps operational transfer rate between the card and the host device.

Samsung expects to begin production of MMCmicro cards in early 2005, although no supporting devices have yet been announced.