This comes to mind because I'm currently without home internet, and have some files I'd like to send to a friend. This app would benefit those who have unlimited texts but limitations on their mobile internet plans.

The app is basically a two-part sender/receiver, that encodes files for transmission by SMS, and then sends them (summarising for the sender the number of SMS messages it will use and requesting verification). At the receiving end, one or more text messages are processed (headed with some string that explains in plain English the nature of the text, and part numbers) into the relevant file.

I understand that this could lead to a whole lot of nonsense in the text, so the app should be able to look through texts and find relevant ones, processing them and removing them from the other texts. Ideally, there would be some way to verify that a recipient is using the app before sending a string of nonsense too. Possibly a prompting text is sent both ways before the file itself.

I don't know if an app like this exists, or is practical. Let me know your thoughts, and if you have any tips in case I decide to start developing it.

Cheers!
Sam

There was a thread about this a while back in Nok dev.
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Communit ... le-via-SMS

Great idea though, and doable.

sending files like packets through sms... brilliant

You could also use the websites providing free sms to do this so that u don't get billed for the SMS'es. Great idea and if u haven't implemented it, I definitely want to help u out on it

This is doable, but unrealistic. It will take forever and numerous SMS texts (or even numerous 300KB MMS texts). I started a trial to figure out some numbers. And here is what I found out..

With a 35KB file (smallest, reasonably sized file I had on my phone other than a .txt file):
~5 minutes to process.
~640 SMS texts
~0.3 MMS texts

That means for a 300KB file (the smallest max MMS size for carriers):
~43 minutes to process
~5,490 SMS texts
~2.5 MMS texts

And for a 1.21MB file (my 5MP camera file size):
~3 hours
~22,700 SMS texts
~10 MMS texts

The reason it takes so long, is once you use the filestream to read into a byte array. You have to append the byte array values into a string for sending ("23,162,5,93,239" instead of B[]). Using a simple for loop, this takes about half a millisecond, but it adds up for each byte in the array when there are thousands of bytes.

For average sized files, it would be pointless to send 2-3 MMS when it can fit in one MMS file although you could send any file type. But when you try to send a large picture without resizing, the fact that it would take 3 hours to compile is a bust. Unless I'm missing a way to send a byte array or a faster way to compile it to a string..