Smartphone: Samsung Galaxy S3
Operating System: Android
Network: Fido LTE
Upon upgrading cell phones – smartphones – I was finding that a service that used to work before, MMS, wasn’t working anymore.
note: I do not have a data plan, I just use it for talk and text.
With the previous phone, with the exact same plan, I was able to send and receive MMS – ie. photos, however, on the new Samsung Galaxy S3 the photos would show up with an option for me to Download them, however when I went to download them the message center just kept showing download in progress, never really getting anywhere.
Very annoying.
The phone I have is an unlocked phone, and going to the Fido site and following the instructions on how to configure MMS for the phone was fairly straight forward, but to no avail.
I rebooted, I went to different sites with different settings, none worked.
The Solution | Send/Receive MMS
To solve this whole thing – I imagine having the right settings for the device as shown on the carrier page (Fido) also is important, but the thing that made it work was simply enabling data on the phone.
To do this on my Android Samsung Galaxy S3 one must:
- settings -> connections -> more networks -> mobile networks -> enable mobile data enable data access over mobile network
Once this is enabled, you will notice that right away the images you were trying to receive or send will be sent.
Conclusion | Enable Auto-Retrieve of MMS
I would also like to advise to enable auto-retrieve of MMS messages on your phone. The alternative is to have to click Download every time you want to retrieve a MMS message. I guess this might be useful to manually do if your friends have a habit of sending large files and you end up paying a lot for over usage?
To enable auto-retrieve:
- in the message application click on the menu button (bottom left) -> settings -> scroll down to Multimedia Message (MMS) settings -> enable Auto-retrieve.
Click here for a video on how to do this.
Hope this helps!
Resources:
- GiffGaff | Help and Support | How to turn on 3G on Samsung S3
- Youtube | Enable / Disable auto-retrieve MMS on Samsung S3
- Fido.ca | How to configure an unlocked device
- Android Central | Forums | Cannot send or receive pictures on Samsuns Galaxy S3