Combining Location-Aware Mobile Phone Applications and Multimedia Messaging

The quickly emerging usage of multimedia messages offers a new approach for mobile collaboration between users and services by providing a mature and easily accessible technology. This article presents a model for combining multimedia messaging, location awareness of a mobile phone and phone applications, and presents a study of users' experiences when they receive the functionality by multimedia message. The results show that the visual information provided in MM messages was perceived to support orientation in the current location and it was considered important. The results also show that social acceptance of the location-aware multimedia message attached application functionality varies between different message categories, favoring user control and personal filtering. It is suggested that the distinct information elements to be considered carefully in technical implementation and in user interface design include sharing and access right management. Particular attention must be paid to designing a categorization system, which is required for successful information filtering and for user interface design. The categorization system must be either commonly agreed or highly customizable.**This article is an extended version of the paper: Häkkilä, J., Mäntyjärvi, J.,User experiences on combining location sensitive mobile phone applications and multimedia messaging, In International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, Maryland USA (MUM), 2004, pp. 179–185