iPhone MMS arrives, months late – now everyone send pictures!

iPhone users, party like it's 2002!

That's the year Wikipedia tells us that Multimedia Message Service first launched (in Norway, in fact), and today, one of the world's most popular smart phones finally decided to show up to the party.

IPhone users and tech watchers will recall that though the iPhone is late to the MMS game in general, US iPhone users are later still. In June, Apple announced availability of MMS on the iPhone, and other countries quickly saw the feature activated, but US lagged in the text-only SMS doldrums for the summer.

AT&T told its Facebook fans that they could expect to see a "carrier settings update" file in iTunes by "late morning, Pacific time," and as of this writing, many are reporting that it's beginning to show up.

Some are reporting that, besides connecting the iPhone to a computer running the latest version of iTunes, downloading the file, and installing it, it's necessary to shut down and restart the iPhone for the update to take effect.

For US iPhone users, the first hours with the new feature has been like Christmas morning. "Got it in Baltimore! FINALLY!" wrote Bill McElhaney on Facebook. Others have expressed concern that it's not working. "Sent an MMS, it got stuck around 90% for a bit, but it went through... at least I think it did," Siamac Afshar wrote.

The Monitor's Matt Shaer reports that some worry the introduction of this feature will crash AT&T's already strained network.

We first reported in May on the strain iPhone users put on AT&T's network, causing sluggish performance and dropped connections. With the introduction of MMS, the situation could go from bad to worse.

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Does MMS work for you? Tell us in the comments, or head over to Twitter – we're @CSMHorizonsBlog.