Patent ID: RE43544

Claim:
A method for transmitting notification messages in a submission of multimedia messages to telecommunications devices embodied as multimedia message sinks, the method comprising: generating a joint notification message intended for a target telecommunications device without knowledge of whether or not the target telecommunications device is suitable for handling multimedia messages , the joint notification message including both (a) a text notification that a multimedia message is available for retrieval from a service center and (b) a binary-coded notification that the multimedia message is available for retrieval from the service center; and transmitting the joint notification message including both the text notification information and binary-coded notification regarding the multimedia message to the target telecommunications device, such that: if the target telecommunications device is suitable for handling multimedia messages, the target telecommunications device can evaluate the binary-coded notification and in response retrieve the multimedia message from the service center; and if the target telecommunications device is not suitable for handling multimedia messages, the target telecommunications device can evaluate the text notification and in response retrieve the multimedia message from the service center.