In recent years, data services have become popular for mobile communications systems, including the very popular so-called short messaging service (SMS), which makes use of underutilized bandwidth of signaling channels to allow short text messages. With SMS, users are able to exchange alphanumeric messages (up to 160 characters in length), and the messages are delivered within seconds of their being transmitted. Of course the networks traversed in providing the messages from one user to another must all be digital cellular networks. Although SMS was originally conceived as a paging mechanism for notifying users of the arrival of voicemail, it is now used primarily as a messaging service. A new use for SMS is a picture messaging application for cellular telephones that is proprietary mobile telephone (e.g., Nokia 3210 GSM) and send them to another, like proprietary telephone (another Nokia 3210 or a Nokia 8210 or Nokia 8850). With a likewise proprietary messaging platform (e.g., Nokia Artus Messaging Platform), operators are able to enhance usage of Short Message Service (SMS) for their subscribers. Such a simple graphic message service provides a black-and-white picture, for instance 72×28 pixels, along with a short greeting displayed below the picture. A maximum size of the greeting is specified, for example 120 characters.
The picture messaging now available with SMS allows greater expression in some respects than pure text. However, a single picture and associated text tends to be too limiting for conveying even quite simple communications. What is needed is a mechanism that builds on the notion of providing a message as a picture and associated text, such as a mechanism that allows sending several such pictures and associated text.
With conventional SMS, if a user wishes to send a series of pictures that in combination convey a message, however, the user must pay for each picture and associated text as a separate and distinct SMS message. In addition, for a sender to send to a recipient an ordered sequence of pictures and associated text, what is here called a funny (as in the so-called funnies of the comics section of some newspapers), the sender must repeat the action required to send the first picture and text for each subsequent picture and text. In other words, the procedure for sending a funny is awkward, including various repetitious acts on the part of the sender. The situation is no less awkward on the receiving side. Moreover, there is no guarantee that on the receiving side the individual SMS messages making up a funny will arrive in the order in which they were sent.
It is known in the art to download actual comic strips from wireless application protocol (WAP) sites, but downloading such comic strips is not a way to provide a message consisting of a sequence of pictures in associated text; the downloaded comics cannot be personalized and sent to a user of another mobile terminal as a single message. Besides, for a mobile telephone to be able to download WAP comics, the mobile telephone must have software designed specifically for that purpose.
An application co-filed with the present application and owned by the owner of the present application discloses a type of message that addresses the needs left unfulfilled by the prior art. The type of message disclosed there includes a plurality of linked frames, each frame including either text or a picture or both, so that a single message consists of a sequence of frames, in the order in which they are linked together. A sender sends such a message as a single, unified message, rather than as three individual SMS picture messages. Correspondingly, and a receiver of such a message is able to view the message, usually frame-by-frame (although future equipment might allow for viewing all of the frames at the same time), save it, and use it as a basis for a message the recipient would later create and send to a third party. The co-filed application does not, however, indicate any particular mechanism by which the individual frames of the sequential-frame message, called a funny (as in the funnies or comics of some newspapers), would be linked together so that sending and receiving equipment is able to refer to the message and manipulate it as a unified entity.
What is needed is a mechanism for linking together the frames of a funny (a sequence of frames of pictures and associated text) so that the funny can be manipulated (viewed, edited, sent and received) as a single entity by a mobile station, preserving the order of the individual frames of the funny. Ideally, such a mechanism would allow existing equipment to properly manipulate a funny, or at least part of a funny, rather than simply signaling to the user of the equipment that a message (of some sort) has been received but cannot be displayed.