If there was ever a person destined to be a sucker for photo messaging, or Multimedia Messaging (MMS) to give it its proper title, it is me. I'm a mobile phone freak who loves cameras and has a hard drive over-run by digital snaps.

Factor in an unbelievably cute three month old baby girl and a text-crazed girlfriend capable of sending messages just using her toes and you can see how photo messaging is destined to big news in the Norris household.

I even enjoyed a trial run with photo messaging courtesy of T-Mobile, the first network to launch a service. I was given an MMS account along with a Sony Ericsson T68i and Communicam camera just around the time Lola was born.

I figured being the proud father of the first newborn in the UK to be flashed round the world by photo messaging was too good an opportunity to miss. So, ignoring all the "no mobile phone signs" plastered around the hospital, I smuggled my handset in with me and seconds after my new daughter drew her first breath whipped out my phone and prepared to snap and send.

A small piece of mobile phone history would have been made were it not for the intervention of a rather burly midwife who insisted the phone would not only interfere with monitors on the nearby intensive care wards, but also could blow up the gas and air machine. I suspected she was lying, but my impassioned speech about the technological significance of the event cut little ice with her, and when security turned up I sheepishly returned the handset to my bag.

Ever since T-Mobile reclaimed their handsets I have been waiting for my network 02 to launch its service. Finally in a blaze of advertising that exhorts its subscribers to "create your own language," the network launched MMS a couple of weeks ago. Guess who was first in the queue to upgrade his mobile.

I must admit to being a little disappointed by the choice of handsets on offer. 02 suggested I invest in a Nokia 7650, a high-end phone stacked out with features like Bluetooth and Java for downloading games. Yet I hate its strange rectangular design and found it a bit cumbersome to use.

Instead I settled on a pair of Sharp GX-1s - a handset exclusive to 02. Having played the GX-1 several months ago,|I was very impressed by its quality large colour screen, easy to use interface and camera features like a mini zoom, and get this - a self-timer.

I could even forgive Sharp for the GX-1's rather outdated upright Mars bar-style design. That was until I saw Vodafone's own picture messaging phone - a really neat clamshell model that looked fabulous and was manufactured by, you guessed it, Sharp.

Orange's excellent choice of phones - which include another desirable clamshell model, Panasonic's GD87, and the Microsoft powered hybrid PDA, the SPV - only fuelled my techno-envy. I have since discovered that a rather cute Siemens phone with camera attachment, the S55, will be available very soon via O2, so maybe I shouldn't have been in such a rush.

Still, we now both have GX-1's up and running (they came at £129 a pop) and I expect at least five images of Lola per day to drop into my MMS inbox. As sending photo messages is free until the end of January we have certainly become a snap happy couple. After that the cost of around 30p per message might slow us down a little.

Of course the images I've sent are nothing like the large, detailed and cleverly captioned ones in the ads. In reality, most pictures you take end up barely being viewable on a phone screen let alone anything larger (you can also upload photos to O2's web page - the recipient gets a text message detailing the URL and a password).

Part of the problem is framing the image. To get a clear image on the screen/viewfinder you have to remain perfectly still, and so does your subject. Inevitably, most of my best shots of Lola have been while she has been sleeping.

As for all the grandiose claims the networks made a few years back about the commercial potential of picture messaging (I seem to remember something about architects snapping images of sites and texting them back to the office) well, they look pretty laughable now.

I have also had fun adding voice and creating a proper Multimedia message. O2 is right. With a combination of image text and sound you can get quite creative.

Ultimately, until phones can take higher resolution images, which will inevitably require more bandwidth to carry the larger files, picture messaging is likely to be the preserve of die-hard early adopters, and, when the price for the handsets drops under £100, a few kids.

A large increase in the birth-rate among tech-savvy dads will probably help too.

Links:

-- O2

-- T-mobile

-- Orange