There’s a new survey by SmartTrust (via TechTree), which seems pretty comprehensive in both scope and conclusion. It was conducted across 6,800 mobile users in 15 countries (UK, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, France, Russia, Brazil, India, USA, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand - if you’re a “need to know” kinda person).

The findings will be depressingly familiar to anyone who reads MobHappy regularly:

“consumers are struggling to keep pace with the rapid deployment of new handset features and data services, as well as complex pricing structures and poor usability.”

And if that’s not enough, our old bugbear of wrongly configured phones is a big problem too.

But, in a “half full” view (not taken by SmartTrust, as they want operators to buy their systems) the findings go on to say that 43% of MMS-capable handsets have sent an MMS, but that only [my phrase] 15% of them had problems with sending. Of those that had problems, 72% said they would use it more if these problems were resolved.

I’d call nearly 50% trial of a new (and still cutting edge) service, with abysmal product marketing, pretty promising actually, with a 15% problem rate not surprising for a new technology. Even the very best usability applications have driver error issues, so I suspect genuine problems were much smaller than this.

What would be interesting to find out is what percentage of the 43% who had sent an MMS, went on to send a second, a third and so on. How many then became heavy users?

Because I suspect that there will be a large drop off between trial and subsequent usage, in the current market.

Why? MMS is still too expensive, for sure, in comparison to dear old SMS and that’s going to hold it back. But I also believe that over and above the simple photo/experience sharing, there’s significant emotional usability issues standing in the way of mass market take-off. In other words, creating the perfect caption to accompany an image (let alone adding audio too) takes far more time and skill than the average person has available. So it’s easier to dash off an SMS - or fall back on “look at me” type of captions accompanying photo/experience sessions.

MMS still has a long way to go in terms of usability, pricing, network compatibility and phone configuration. But I found this survey much more promising than I expected.