Up until now, I’ve never opened an MMS successfully. My Internet settings on the phone were never set
probably plus I never bothered to do it. I also didn’t know the billing rates for opening them either.
But now, an opportunity arose for me to require MMS. The Deutsche Bahn has three options for distributing tickets purchased online. The first one is by printing them out, but I don’t have a printer. The second method is having them mailed to me, but that costs 3.50 euro. The third and best option, is to have them sent as MMS. Knowing that my phone, the P1i, has this ability, I looked for how to do it. After going through lots of Googling and reading through translated German sites, I finally figured it out.

Now, I use Vodafone in Germany, but this method may work on other providers even. I am also using GPRS, and not 3G (I don’t have a dataplan unfortunately). The way to do it is to register an account on Vodafone.de using your phone number. Obviously, if you use a different provider, you’d go to their website to make the account. I clicked through their services and found an option called the “HandyKonfigurator”. What it does is it sends me the proper settings required for my phone. I clicked through the dropdown boxes, found my phone and pressed continue. Vodafone then sent me a file that would inject the settings into my phone. They also sent me a PIN that I had to enter before my phone settings were changed. I did as I was asked, and now I can receive MMS messages!

Vodafone Internet Account Settings

• Address: event.vodafone.de
• No user name and password required
• IP Config and DNS Addresses are set to automatic
• Proxy Server: 139.7.29.17 at port 80

Vodafone MMS Account Settings

• Service Center Address: http://139.7.24.1/servlets/mms

Since I arrived in Germany, I had been looking for a good phone plan.  I figure I should just stick with a prepaid phone plan since I can’t imagine myself getting a lot of phone calls.  I ended up using one of Vodafone’s prepaid phone plans.  The closest phone plan from Fido is their prepaid plan.  Below is a comparison (as of January 18, 2011).

It seems that everything is mostly the same in terms of making calls and sending text messages.  But the biggest perk in Vodafone’s plan is the fact that receiving international calls is free.  That’s the same as Fido’s “unlimited incoming calls feature”.  The expiring date is longer too.  But as with most better features, they almost always cost more.  Here €10 is just about $3 more expensive than Fido’s plan.