A mobile services company dubbed Grapevine Interactive has developed what they’re calling MMS Lite, a hybrid SMS/MMS solution that aims to fill the niche between simple text-based SMS and more complex and expensive MMS.
Created for mobile marketers, Grapevine Interactive CTO Cliff Court states: “Mobile marketers, in particular, have been asking for a product offering more than text-only SMS but with less of the complexity and high cost of MMS.” To answer that need, Grapvine’s “MMS Lite” solution combines a notification message with a larger rich message. This rich message includes a heading of up to 500 characters of text plus two images with optional captions. In addition, recipients can send a 250-character reply at almost zero cost.
An example of when MMS Lite could be used instead of SMS or MMS is when a company or brand would like to attach a simple logo or graphical brand name to a marketing message. This obviously isn’t allowable with SMS, and would normally render poorly on most handsets with MMS. Think of it as an SMS with very limited graphical capabilities.
Details are still somewhat limited on how exactly it works, but my first impression is that it’s simply not needed. If the solution would bring limited MMS-like functionality to handsets that can only facilitate SMS, than it could be very useful, but I doubt that’s the case. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.