A long long time ago I got my first "internet capable" phone which contained a new messaging technology. That phone was the Ericsson T68i and that new technology was MMS! While the phone had a camera attachment, it was a separate purchase, and it was an anemic 0.3MP (which is what my SonyEricsson P800 camera was, I think).  In any case, the idea behind MMS was that it would be a cross-platform, cross-carrier way of being able to send multimedia messages.  Users would be able to snap photos, videos, gifs and jpegs that they have on their phone, as well as text (formatted text!), smiley images and sounds to create a multimedia extravaganza.  In MMS applications the user was able to create slides (sort of like powerpoint) and a slide count contain text, images and sound. Slides could be laid ontop of one another to create shows and animations (sort of like the youtube video bellow).

Well, that was the idea. Not that everyone would create such a multimedia extravaganza, but the option was there.  As we started to move away from Symbian, and Windows Mobile started entering the phone space, and as the iPhone was gung-ho about not including MMS, we've slowly gotten away from MMS as something rich, and we've seen MMS as a simple photo sharing. Now we are starting to see apps for the iPhone which are starting to explore those same issues as the original MMS spec and I am starting to wonder whether people have used the original MMS apps to their full potential and found iPhone capability lacking? or whether original MMS apps were too avant garde for their time and we are just coming to the point where these features are wanted.