Orange France will disable WiFi sharing, Group MMS and Visual Voicemail in Mango update

In an interesting internal-memo obtained by Smartphone France, the carrier evidently plans to disable Wifi Sharing, Group MMS (which we covered as being potentially pricey) and Visual Voicemail.

Perhaps WiFi sharing, something we've seen earlier , shouldn't be too much of a surprise--after all, it's expensive, especially for those carriers that don't have a built in billing system. So while a downer, not exactly shocking--in fact we expect more carriers to follow. Group MMS seems benign at first, but we documented how this "feature" can be very expensive. In short, it's labeled as "Group Messaging" but instead of SMS it use MMS in order to keep all the messages threaded. Sending out dozens of MMS messages can be very pricey for some services.

Finally there's Visual Voicemail, which is instantiated in a unique fashion in Mango. As a result, carriers seem limited in their ability to integrate the Mango VV with their own system, hence why we probably will, once again, see this on more carriers as well.

While not the end of the world, it's good for Orange customers in France to be aware of what they are and are not getting with Mango.

Source: Smartphone France, via WPSauce

Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.