Re: Unicode, SMS, PDA/cellphones

From: Cristian Secară (orice@secarica.ro)
Date: Sun May 28 2006 - 09:08:50 CDT

  • Next message: Richard Wordingham: "Re: Unicode, SMS, PDA/cellphones"

    On Sun, 28 May 2006 16:31:06 +0800, Donald Z. Osborn wrote:

    > * Message length being rather shorter in Unicode SMS than with 7 or 8
    > bit

    Usual [Latin] SMS messages are using the 7-bit GSM character set. Just
    a few additional characters are using an escape character.
    (ref.: http://www.csoft.co.uk/sms/character_sets/gsm.htm )
    A single SMS message written solely using characters from the 7-bit GSM
    character set can have maximum 160 characters. If, during SMS
    composition, a single non-GSM character is entered, then the whole
    message will turn to double byte, limiting a single message to maximum
    70 characters. I don't know if each transmitted character is direct 2
    bytes PMB, or UTF16 transformation encoding.

    Every time I try to send a SMS message that includes accented
    characters for my language (Romanian), I can't stop to blame those who
    have established the SMS technical standard, because the fixed 2-bytes
    character for Latin is pure waste of space (and money :).

    Cristi



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