At the risk of invoking a round of reader rage, I'll admit that I've never really been that hyped on the idea of MMS on the iPhone (and, by the way, get off my lawn). If I want to send someone a picture, I've got their email address; I'll just send them a picture. No big whoop.

I do have some friends and colleagues who 'came up' on mainline camera phones and they gleefully pop pics back and forth via MMS. I also appreciate the ability to decode the snapshots my wife sends from her Motorola RAZR, but overall I wouldn't rate it among the top iPhone features I was eager to get from AT&T (not like the ongoing lack of tethering, which is making me grind my teeth in my sleep).

That prejudicial attitude may have made me a little skeptical when I met with FunMobility's CEO Adam Lavine this week to get a preview of his company's new free app FunMail [iTunes link], which promises to leverage the Semantic Media Project and add appropriate imagery to your MMS messages, short emails, Facebook wall posts, et cetera. It's available in the US App Store as of last night.

Sure, the app is simple enough to use (once you register and accept the company's TOS, which may subject you to occasional text messages from them if you don't opt out) -- type in your message, and the system gives you the text (up to 140 characters) atop your choice of image from a list of five, sourced from FunMobility's licensed libraries along with Creative Commons remixable content from Flickr and other repositories. If you want to include a hidden search term, putting it at the end of the message with a double-hash (##) will tell FunMail to search those words without including them in the sent message. You can send it to any mobile phone number in your address book, to email recipients, or to your Facebook friends or wall via Facebook Connect. The result is a little bit inspirational office poster, a little bit LOLcat, and in some ways strangely intriguing... but not really, you know, useful.

Just when you thought your iPhone was more secure than ever, you might want to think again. Programmer Karl Kraft's 12-year-old son was the one to uncover the security risk of the iPhone displaying text messages while in emergency call mode.

With the iPhone locked with a passcode and text message previews disabled, you can still see an incoming text message while you are in the emergency call mode.

The iPhone should just show the generic "New Text Message" preview, but instead it will show the part of the message (or whole message if it's short enough), and sender information.

You can get the full details on this bug, and screenshots of the iPhone from Karl's blog. Now we must sit and wait for Apple to fix it. Hopefully this won't take as long as implementing copy/paste for the iPhone.


[via Ars Technica]

Since we found it, SMS Mac has stirred conflict between price and convenience for us here at TUAW, but I nevertheless felt it pertinent to blog the latest v2.1. Besides the $10/yearly price and $5/50 SMS messages, quit a bit has changed from that original version. It now includes both a Dashboard and Yahoo! Widget, the ability to send SMSes to Address Book Groups, better features for delivery report handling and more.

If money were no object, I would call SMS Mac one of the most functional and convenient desktop SMS utilities I've ever seen. Unfortunately, its high price and yearly subscription model have scared this blogger off to find a more reasonable alternative.