Gossip

"We don't need no steenkin cameras in our camera phones..."

Made your Sniffer's weekend, this did: Mobile News did a "mystery caller" test of the leading UK mobile networks, to see how to do picture messaging. Trick question; the bastard has a Nokia 6310i phone...

For those who - like the hopeless, hapless telesup guys at T-Mobile and Vodafone - aren't phone experts, phone picture messaging requires two things.

First, you have to have the ability to display pictures (so you can receive them!) on the phone. And second, you have to have the ability to take pictures, so you can transmit them to someone else.

The Nokia 6310i is, truly, one of the classic mobile phones; it's now years old, and remains excellent, reliable, and good with battery life. None of which can overcome two unchangeable features: no colour display, and no camera.

Did this bother the network telesup guys? Not a bit!

"Rory at Vodafone asked what kind of phone it was," reports the mystery caller, "and said: 'You should be fine - there's no reason at all why the phone shouldn't work.'" And at T-Mobile, Tracy had to look the phone up in a database (it probably has been on the market longer than Tracy has) before coming back with the good news: "You'll be able to send and receive picture messages almost wherever you are in the world."

Triband and GPRS, indeed, are good (necessary!) features for picture messaging, and the Nokia 6310i has those. Pity about no camera, no colour display...

The May 6 edition of Mobile News is out now, but not yet up on the  web site