Self described technology think-tank The Diffusion Group reported this week consumers are becoming more amenable to the idea of listening to music or viewing video on their mobile handsets.

The report, Media Phones: The Next Portable Media Player?, found among households connected to the Internet who also use a cell phone, 42 percent would be comfortable listening to music and 30 percent would be at ease watching TV or movies on their phone.

Analyst Dale Gilliam III commented, "Among Internet households in particular, enjoying digital mobile multimedia is becoming increasingly attractive. Consumers are looking for convenient ways to access their digital media and the mobile phone offers an intuitive, familiar, and comfortable form factor through which to enjoy this content."

Not surprisingly, age was a contributing factor towards acceptance. For example 18 to 24 year old heads-of-household, at nearly 60 percent, are most comfortable with handset music, with 46 percent expressing comfort with cell phone TV and movie watching.

White Noise
While an overall increase in the comfort level for these new types of mobile offerings should be welcome news to the wireless industry, ease-of-use, reliability, and incompatibility issues must be ironed out to make them pervasive.

A survey by research firm Juniper underscores the current state of affairs. Although it said the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) market should hit $42.2 billion this year before nearly quadrupling over the next five years, the report also points out how MMS has so far failed to deliver on its earnings promise due to the last two issues mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

Furthermore, mobile multimedia solutions provider Mobixel Network conducted a survey where it discovered that carriers not properly implementing MMS stand to lose up to $6 billion. The report also said up to 20 percent of MMS messages don't make it from handset to handset.

Mobixell Networks VP of Marketing and Business Development put it this way, "If an MMS message is not delivered successfully, the mobile provider not only earns nothing, but also actually loses money in slower network infrastructure Return on Investment, increased calls from dissatisfied users to call centers, and overall lower customer satisfaction.

Say Cheese
According to a survey of 500 potential and current camera phone users by Greenfield Online—commissioned by online photo service Snapfish—56 percent of those questioned predict that the camera phone spells doom for digital and film cameras over the next couple of decades, demonstrating how well established these devices have become

Greenfield also found that 62 percent of camera phone owners store their photos on their phones rather than leverage additional storage or sharing options.

So, in essence, once a person takes a picture with a camera phone, he doesn't know what to do with them. As a result, wireless subscribers aren't even getting the most out of this more established mobile feature.

As Snapfish VP of Mobile Christopher Wu asserted, "Storage and printing are the real problems. The survey shows that only 22 percent of camera phone owners print photos taken on their camera phone, despite 73 percent of them expressing a strong interest in doing so."

That leaves an opening for vendors, like Snapfish, who can ease the process of removing photos from users phones. Snapfish offers a suite of digital imaging services for wireless carriers, currently in use by Cingular Wireless.

Dubbed MyPhoto Album by Snapfish, the Cingular service offers free unlimited storage and camera phone image printing from both the phone and PC. While only Snapfish carrier partners benefit from its full image suite, some features are available to everyone

All camera phone users, for instance, can get prints by e-mailing photos from their phones to save@mysnapfish.com. Once photos are on Snapfish, prints are available for 19 cents each, and for online sharing and storage.