Motivation

It may happen you need some document or file from the internet but you are OFFLINE. You've got your notebook but there is no broadband of wifi, a reasonably competent cell phone but no data price-plan. What can you do? Your friend is sitting online but can't send you the file, because it doesn't fit size of the SMS (160 characters/bytes), it is not an image to be send as MMS. Wait here! It actually CAN be send through MMS, it just need to be encoded to an image .... ! :)

How it works?

You may send long text, one or multiple images or even a video within a single MMS , the only limitation is what your operator provides and allows. In general, we can encode any arbitrary data into a lossless PNG image, send it through the GSM network, receive on a remote cell phone and decode back to the format we intially sent off. Look at the following scenario.

You are sitting in your cottage far far away from civilisation, you intend to watch a chinese movie but you don't have subtitles. And your friend cand send them to you. The procedure is as follows:

1. You friend gets the subs from the net,
2. Encodes the file either online or in her/his phone using a java application into a PNG image,
3. Sends the image as MMS to you (e.g. through a free MMS portal),
4. You - sitting in the wilderness - receive the MMS, save the image(s) and using a java application decode the file
5. Download it from the phone to your notebook via infrared, Bluetooth or cable,
6. and you watch the movie :)

Prerequisities

However, before you do so, you need to be prepared for this scenario. For that matter, you will need that 'magical' java application, which can encode and decode the PNG. You can get it right HERE. For instructions how to installing to you phone, please check the phone's manual or google first.

That's it! :)