Chinese text messages on iPhone

Matt, I do not see how your reply has anything to do with the problem. Tell me If I didn't get it.

True. However, it is available to everyone, as Steve Jobs mentioned, "foreign languages are just a click away". So, no matter where you buy your iPhone, Japan, HongKong or the USA, the plan you have suscribed with the iPhone should allow all those text messages to be sent. And right now, with AT&T, you can't fully utilize your phone as advertised.

Tom, I see your point. So, why emails (even though asian encodings are not fully supported by Gmail, so you usually see a bunch of gibberish instead of chinese characters in your incoming emails), and not text messages?
I understand Apple wants this to work. However, I am not sure they have had the feedback that it doesn't because of AT&T.

I am grateful to Apple for implementing those languages on every single iPhone on earth and not just the ones sold in each respective country. Because people around earth actually do speak more than one language, or want to learn. And sending text messages to practice on a daily basis is a great way to improve. That's how I learned chinese, basically: practice any day, at any place, at anytime.

What I suggest is have Apple talk to AT&T about this.. so people living in the US could make these international keyboards 100% useful.

In fact, the issue here is not just being able to send text messages.. it is also the issue of not receiving the text messages that are sent in a different language. So my girlfriend in China, when she writes me a text message, I never receive it. Well, unless she writes exclusively with latin characters, but she can't. We don't communicate much anymore because of that. How frustrating. The text messages was the only way to keep in touch, given the fact that she's usually at work when I am sleeping and I am at work when she is sleeping.

So how is AT&T responding to this when their ads for the iPhone plan specify "international calls/text messages" ?

I know it works fine in France, so Orange's servers seem to be better than AT&T's at dealing with encodings.

Message was edited by: GillouStyle

In fact, I have had someone try with T-Mobile on their unlocked iPhone and same results. No messages received nor sent if it contains the slightest amount of asian characters.

Right. Thanks.

apollo, I had not any solution at the time I was in the US. But now that i've moved back to France, i'm happy to tell you it works fine. It's all good here