I recently fell of the back of a boat which resulted in my faithful Samsung Omnia being written off.  Since this was a personal phone, I decided to upgrade to a Nokia Lumia 800 as it looked like a fab phone.  I have so far not been disappointed, however I hit two problems.

The first was that my SIM was not a micro-sim. I contacted Virgin who told me they were very soon to launch a micro-sim, but not yet.  I bought a 30-day sim from Vodafone in the short term, but then discovered that I could trim the current SIM to fit by following the detailed instructions at http://www.solutios.com/simcutting/. 

All has been happy until my wife asked about sending MMS pictures from her phone.  When I tried to do it from mine, I discovered that it kept on failing with an error and asking me to try again.  This has been the second challenge that I have had with the phone!

Searching the web found many frustrated people, some who had resorted to resetting their phones to factory defaults to get things working.  I definitely did not want to do that.  After pulling together information from a number of sources, this is what worked for me.  I should thank John at Virgin's support desk as he also gave me the final piece to "enable" my account for MMS.

As a note, I got the APN and MMS settings from the Virgin Mobile pages for an android phone - here for 3G and here for MMS.

Here is what I did:

1. Download the Network Setup tool for the Lumia 800 (I suspect it is also available for the 610/710/900).  If you don't have it, you can get it from http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=b95840dc-a542-42a6-bee4-7d1a12f62d2c
2. Ran the tool, selected Virgin as the Operator
3. Pressed the "+" at the bottom to select add apn
4. Entered the following details

• Connection name: Virgin2
• Under Internet APN
• Access point name: goto.virginmobile.uk
• Proxy address: 193.30.166.4
• Proxy port: 8080
• Username: user
• Password:                  (I left this blank)
• Under MMS APN
• MMS access point name: goto.virginmobile.uk
• Proxy address: 193.30.166.2
• Proxy port: 8080
• Username: user
• Password:                  (I left this blank)
• MMSC address: http://mms.virginmobile.co.uk:8002

I still found it was not working and upon ringing Virgin they told me my SIM was not yet MMS enabled.  To do this, they told me to send a picture to myself.  I did this and now it is all working - super!!

I’m clearly not a big MMS user as I’ve had the sim for a while, but it is nice to know that I can use it now, although I suspect e-mail will continue to be my primary carrier of pictures.

ttfn

David