Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) was a cross-industry collaboration between

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in inform ...

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorola ...

Siemens Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad. The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', ''E ...

and Alcatel among others, which provided an application-level extension to Short Message Service (SMS) for

cellular phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while ...

s available on

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such ...

, TDMA and

CDMA Code-division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method used by various radio communication technologies. CDMA is an example of multiple access, where several transmitters can send information simultaneously over a single communicatio ...

networks. EMS was an intermediate technology, between SMS and MMS, providing some of the features of MMS. EMS was a technology designed to work with existing networks, but was ultimately made obsolete by MMS. An EMS-enabled mobile phone could send and receive messages that had special text formatting (such as bold or italic), animations, pictures, icons, sound effects and special

ringtone A ringtone, ring tone or ring is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call. Originally referring to and made by the electromechanical striking of bells, the term now refers to any sound on any device alerting of a new incoming ...

s. EMS messages sent to devices that did not support it would be displayed as SMS messages, though they may be unreadable due to the presence of additional data that cannot be rendered by the device. In some countries, EMS messages could not generally be sent between subscribers of different mobile phone carriers, as they will frequently be dropped by the inter-carrier network or by the receiving carrier. However, in other countries, such as the UK, inter-carrier interoperability was generally achieved. EMS never really picked up due to interoperability limitations and in fact very few operators ever introduced it. EMS is defined in 3GPP Technical Specification 3GPP TS 23.040 (originally GSM 03.40). On June 9, 2008, the CTIA organization officially released an RFI for Enhanced Messaging implementation with focus on Group Messaging. The EM term in this context loosely refers to an improved mobile messaging product that combines the simplicity of Text Messaging with the successful rich features of the Internet's

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and tri ...

. Other references to this new service have been made as "SMS 2" or "Instant SMS".

References

{{Reflist GSM standard

See also

References