OTA bitmap

OTA Bitmap was a specification designed by Nokia for black and white images for mobile phones.

Introduction

The OTA or Over The Air Bitmap was defined by Nokia Corporation as part of their Smart Messaging Specification, to send pictures as a series of one or more concatenated SMS text messages. The format has a maximum size of 255x255 pixels. It is very rare for an OTA bitmap to measure anything other than 72x28 pixels (for Picture Messages) or 72x14/72x13 (for Operator Logos). The specification contains a byte of data to be used for indicating a multicolour image. This was to future-proof the standard, but the advent of Multimedia Messaging meant it never got to implementation.

Basic format description

The OTA Bitmap format is a monochrome, uncompressed format using one bit per pixel. As the format was designed for cellular phones, there is no standard computer format. It may be stored as a binary file or as hex (usually without spaces) in a text file. Recognized extension is .otb.