Without going into boring details, I have replaced my trusty (but failing) Sony Ericsson W995 with a new phone.  The W995 was a marvellous beast, with a lovely feel to it, but it had simply become too unreliable.

I have replaced it with an HTC Desire.  It has a lovely big touch screen, which is a joy to use (a relief after having had very bad experiences with an LG Viewty), has built-in GPS, and synchronises with Outlook via HTC Sync like a dream.  It has enabled me to ditch my HP iPaq, which was relatively large, had battery life of only a few hours, and needed a separate GPS receiver (oh, and a separate phone if you wanted to make calls).

All in all I’m very happy with the new phone.  It runs on the Android operating system; I had heard a lot of good things about Android, and a lot of bad things about Windows Mobile 7, which probably influenced my decision.  I probably would have chosen the Microsoft route otherwise.

However, after upgrading to Android 2.2 (known as Froyo) the HTC Desire stopped sending MMS messages (though to be honest, I don’t know that this didn’t happen before the upgrade).

Every time I tried, I would receive one of the following errors, and the message would sit in my outbox:

Generic network failure
Message format corrupt

After a long investigation and a lot of hunting on Google (which led me down the red-herring route of setting up additional APNs), I discovered the problem: the default messaging app has issues sending MMS messages to contacts with spaces in the phone number.  For example, the app would send an MMS just fine to 07712123456, but would fail if the number was entered as 07712 123456 or +44 7712 123456.  The latter format is the one I favour, for both readability and functionality when dialling from abroad.

The problem is compounded because (for UK regional settings) Outlook forces a space into the number straight after the +44 country code and there’s no way to avoid it – and this gets transferred to the phone when it syncs.

I have found two solutions to this:

1. Reformat all your contact numbers to remove country codes and spaces
2. Download and use Handcent for all outgoing MMS messages

The first solution is a pain the backside because you need to remember the country code when abroad and dialing UK numbers (or when dialing foreign numbers from the UK), and the second solution is less than perfect because, while Handcent thankfully integrates with Android’s Share menu, it is not as polished and easy to use as the built-in messaging app.

As a possible third solution you could probably add an additional number to each contact you’re likely to want to send MMS messages to; this number would be the same as their mobile number, but formatted with no spaces.  If you sync with Outlook you’d also need to omit country codes (since Outlook will force a space after the country code).

I’m currently using solution #2, mainly because I rarely send MMS messages, so don’t want to go to too much effort – but I do want it to work on those rare occassions.