"SMS has been very successful because the pricing was very clear and simple," Nokia's regional director for imaging Mauro Montanaro said in a seminar ahead of the region's top telecoms trade fair.

"The pricing is very important. So we need to be able to sort of drive the industry towards simple pricing," Montanaro said.

Other factors crucial to the success of MMS, touted as the next big thing after the phenomenally popular Short Messaging Service (SMS), include ease of use and open operating standards among the industry's leading telecoms vendors, he said.

Unlike SMS which is restricted to text, MMS allows color pictures, animation, recorded sound and even video to be transmitted.

According industry players who spoke at the seminar, the depth of the content is an equally important ingredient for MMS to take off.

"You definitely need a lot of content to support MMS," Tan Meng Wee, president and chief executive of Orange Gum, a Singapore-based content developer, told AFP.

Apart from Japan where mobile users are already sending MMS-like messages, the rest of the region is still lagging, he said.

Matti Alahuhta, Nokia's president for mobile phones, said the next three months would be "exciting times" for the region and elsewhere around the world for the much anticipated launch of MMS.

By the end of the year, almost 50 percent of all Nokia handsets sold to consumers will be MMS-enabled, he said.

"I would say the next three months will be a very active period for MMS," Alahuhta said.

"The operators are now preparing for the service," he said.

To date, the Finnish telecom equipment giant has launched four mobile handsets with MMS capabilities, he said.

MMS can now be implemented on existing wireless systems even before operators roll out the costly third generation platforms, whose commercial launch timetable has been clouded by financial problems.

Despite the limited functions of SMS, it has been a huge money spinner for telecoms operators with one billion messages sent daily worldwide.

CommunicAsia 2002, Asia's biggest telecommuciations fair, will formally open in Singapore today and leading players are expected to use the event to promote their MMS offerings.

Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., one of Asia's biggest players, has said MMS will be the next wave in mobile communications.

The region is expected to be the main battleground in the mobile phone business in the next few years as handset sales taper off in more mature markets like North America and Europe.