The Particle Photon is a small device that can be used for building Internet of Things projects due to its 120 MHz ARM Cortex M3 processor, WiFi capabilities, and low cost. It can send SMSes and MMSes using Twilio's API by following these steps: creating a Twilio account, purchasing an SMS-capable phone number, retrieving the Twilio account SID and API secret, setting up a Particle Webhook with Twilio, and flashing the code to the Photon. The process is straightforward and can be completed in 20 minutes. Additionally, the Photon can also send MMSes by publishing to two event names: "twilio_sms" for SMSes and "twilio_mms" for MMSes, which allows sending media messages with images.