All I Want is a Photograph

October 27, 2011 6:11 AM

Will I ever be able to send photos from my unlocked phone?

I bought an unlocked Samsung Behold; it was a T-Mobile phone, but my service is with AT&T. It seems to text fine, but won't send photos; I get a message that the send failed because the service is unavailable. AT&T tells me they don't support unlocked phones, and they can't help me get ours to send photos. My wife, owner of the phone, doesn't want to switch to T-Mobile because of AT&T's program where she and other AT&T customers, most notably her best friend, can talk without using up minutes.

Is there any other option/hack to make this functionality operable?

posted by troywestfield to Technology (7 answers total)

Best answer: It might be you need to set up the MMS settings on the phone, which could either be blank or still set up for T-Mobile. Is this helpful at all? If not, maybe call up AT&T, don't tell them you have an unlocked phone, just say you accidentally changed something in the MMS settings and please could they tell you what the correct settings are? When they say they "don't support unlocked phones", I presume they mean they don't offer technical support for them, not that their services won't work on them.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 6:20 AM on October 27, 2011

You're not going to be able to send MMS over Edge and you can't get 3G since T-Mo and AT&T use different bandwidth for 3G.

Probably the best workaround is to upload the photo somewhere (Flickr or similar) and send a link.
posted by anaelith at 8:04 AM on October 27, 2011

As mentioned above, the carriers use different MMS APN.

If your phone has email, you can send your pics via email to your wife's MMS - that's what iPhone users used to do :)
posted by 7life at 8:27 AM on October 27, 2011

Best answer: AT&T are total dicks about using unlocked phones. T-Mobile is great in they'll even push the MMS settings to your unsupported phone to you. It is really sad that T-Mobile is most likely to be absorbed by AT&T.

But to use the phone on AT&T you'll have to set the MMS manually. Here is a the first result when I googled ATT MMS settings Samsung Behold (I don't know the difference between the Behold and Behold II so you may need to tweak it somewhat...regardless of model, the APN and other settings will be the same between phones).
posted by birdherder at 11:00 AM on October 27, 2011

Best answer: nthing MMS settings - I did this same thing several years ago (taking an unlocked T-Mobile phone onto an AT&T account) and a nice man at the AT&T store got on the phone with internal customer service and fixed it for me. Unless something major has changed in the technology in the last few years, this should fix it.
posted by dust.wind.dude at 11:33 AM on October 27, 2011

anaelith wrote: You're not going to be able to send MMS over Edge and you can't get 3G since T-Mo and AT&T use different bandwidth for 3G.

What? No. MMS works even on GPRS, it's only slower.

birdherder's link has it.
posted by wierdo at 12:01 AM on October 28, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks very much. I had birdherder and EndsOfInvention's links open in front of me for reference, and used them to know what I was talking about, during three support sessions with Samsung and AT&T. A nice man at AT&T finally spent an hour with me fixing it. It was as you guys suggested, but even worse/dumber; we have Web access and didn't know it, but the Web and MMS settings both were T-Mobile's. birdherder's link got me to the settings, and the support guy and I did the rest, and now it works. So thanks a ton. AskMe is friggin awesome.
posted by troywestfield at 6:24 AM on October 28, 2011 [1 favorite]