I've just received my phone bill for this month in the post. I have an iPhone 4S and my contract was set up with Orange.

My contract allows me unlimited texts, 300 minutes and 1GB of Internet a month.

This month is was charged an extra £8 for sending 31 picture messages. I send photos to friends via iMessage and on whatsapp but I was not aware that there was any extra charge for sending photos using these services.

Is this an error? Or have I been wrong all along, and you do get charged for photos sent on iMessage/whatsapp? (I've checked through my inbox and I have sent absolutely no images as standard SMS messages.)

Thanks.

Have you sent any SMS texts to a group of people at one? (on New Year's Eve maybe)? As some mobiles send these as MMS messages (I.e. picture messages) if you add more than a certain number of people to one message.

Also, if you send a photo via imessage, and the recipient has imessage turned off, or the imessage servers time out for some reason, it'll be sent as a standard SMS/MMS.

True, if the picture message sent over iMessage doesn't say "delivered" underneath after up to a minute, what I do is go to settings and turn "send as SMS" off until the message is delivered so that I am not charged for an MMS.

It's normally after about 5 minutes that the message/picture sends as SMS/MMS if it doesn't deliver as an iMessage, although sometimes it is a shorter time after.

Also, i think that if you reply to someone elses MMS (to you) then that defaults to been an MMS on some handsets

This is true, but personally this has never happened to me on an iPhone.

Yes, on Christmas Eve I sent a Happy Christmas text to 29 people at once. Could that be it?

Possibly.

Can't you see on your bill when the media messages were sent?

Yes that is most probably it.

No I suppose if I rang up Orange they'd be able to tell me though.

I think I'll just assume its the Christmas texts for now. If it happens again though ill start making enquiries.