MMS failings avoided by Cognima system employed by Bonusprint

Bonusprint's press release Bonusprint: Print, share and store your camera-phone photos

Bonusprint, the popular high street and mail order/online photo printing service, has launched Bonsuprint Mobile, a service for storing, sharing and printing photos and video clips direct from your camera phone without having to use expensive MMS.

MMS image quality issue
In partnership with middleware specialist, Cognima, Bonusprint is offering the service without forcing customers to use MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). By all accounts MMS, which is designed to work like SMS text messaging, but for sending and receiving pictures and other multimedia clips, is struggling because of high pricing and lack of customer interest. But that's not all: "MMS degrades the image quality of photos as it compresses them," explained Anthony Ward, managing director of Bonusprint.

Lower cost than MMS
While it can cost around 50 pence to send a single MMS image, before the cost of printing, Bonsuprint is confident that with the right phone package and moderate usage over a month, an average cost per 6x4 inch print of under 25p is achievable. This includes GPRS bandwidth charges and a £1.99 monthly subscription that nets you 100MB of online storage. Basic 6x4 inch print charges are around 12p each.

Fire and forget resilience
Cognima's in-phone application, Cognima Snap, handles the upload and management of images between the phone and server using a 'fire and forget' replication system that is very resilient to network and signal interruptions. To start with, most phones will operate via GPRS but Cognima can support 3G mobile broadband for faster transfers in selected phones.

The main focus from Cognima is on Symbian OS smart phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson, but its software has also been ported to other phones, including selected Samsung models, for example. Support for selected Palm phones and other camera-enabled devices is expected in the future. It's a relatively simple process to download the Cognima phone application via the service registration procedure.

Bonusprint Mobile is the first online service the company has offered with online albums and sharing facilities. Customers can send friends, colleagues and family links to their albums, which can be protected by passwords where necessary. Ward told dpnow.com that there are plans to upgrade the existing Bonsuprint online service to include a similar feature set next year.

Cognima is rolling out its service in the US and other continental European countries soon.

A subscription-free 30 day trial of Bonusprint Mobile is currently available.

Dpnow's chosen online photo printing partner is Photobox. Photobox currently offers an MMS-based photo upload service and free (both for sender and receiver) photo-sending to other MMS-enabled phones.